How to create a custom reference field in JSD?

[Dimitar I_ Dimitrov]

Hey guys, I want to add a bunch of custom fields to my JSD incident form. Fields like 'Parent Incident', 'Related Problem', 'Related Change', etc.

For all of these, I need to create the custom field to be of type reference, so that it would fetch the object of the specified type. How can I do that?

[Adrián Plaza [DEISER]]

Hi @Dimitar I_ Dimitrov,

You need to use an APP for this purpose, for example: https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/com.codedpoetry.easylinks.easy-links/server/overview

You can create new custom fields and filter the result of these fields.

Cheers,

Adrián.

[Dimitar I_ Dimitrov]

So there is nothing out of the box for that common functionality in the core platform?? Really?

[Adrián Plaza [DEISER]]

The answer is no @Dimitar I_ Dimitrov

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

No, because it's mostly not stuff users enter, it's for incident managers/agents on the most part.

[Dimitar I_ Dimitrov]

Sad that it's not OOTB, I don't agree with the fact that only incident managers would use it. Engineers working on incidents should also do so, on resolution and creating input to other processes. Anyway, a pitty such common things need to be plugins. This should be core.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

No, you've missed the point.  It's not for the people raising the incidents as Service Desk "requests" if they're going through your helpdesk.  It IS for incident managers and people working on the "issue" that is behind the request, and on those, they do have the references - issue links.

[Dimitar I_ Dimitrov]

Hey @Nic Brough -Adaptavist-yes, I get that. I was just thinking from the perspective of a large company where these people who are working on the issues are actually thousands. Then the use-case becomes more demanding. However, I will definitely try out the plugin you guys suggested. I mean, if that's the way to go, that's the way to go;) I am coming from the ServiceNow land and I may be little spoiled;) Still new to Atlassian but getting up to speed quick:) Thanks for the timely replies!

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

I'm thinking from a "purist" service or help desk view, which is roughly what Atlassian do with Jira Service Desk.  I tend to agree with them when they group people up such that:

Customer:  wants something done or fixed.  Doesn't care about other reports of similar issues, who is working on it, or how it gets fixed or done, they just want something working/done.

Agent:  has to listen to a lot of customers (as above) who may or may not be talking about related things, and respond to them.  Can fix the simple stuff, but will need to draw on pools of other people if it's a bug (talk to dev), monetary (talk to finance), office problem (talk to building managers), incident (talk to system owners), ... and so-on

Developer:  deals with bugs, looks into new feature requests and is likely to get drawn into incidents if they might be helpful.

Thing here is that definition of customer.  They really aren't going to care to link incidents - most customers won't even bother to raise a new one if they already know your team is working on it.  The customer has no real use for what you're asking for.

Your agents and developers really DO have a use for it.  For developers, "we know" means "we can close stuff that's duplicated and hence just pointless noise", for Agents, there's the same thing, but also reporting on numbers of people who raised it, how fast it was fixed and so-on.  And Agents and Developers have "link issue to" on the issues.

[Dimitar I_ Dimitrov]

@Nic Brough -Adaptavist-totally agree with that. I am also talking about the Agents and Developers. And in enterprise companies the number of those people is quite large and I think it makes itself a good use case for having stuff like ability to link issue types be a common, core thing in the platform. 

Example with us: we are over 20000 internal customers, but also we have few thousands agents. I hope you can see my case:) Easy Links is a nice fit for that, I just think that type of functionality is too common to be outside of the core package. But again, this is my personal point of view;) Thanks! 

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

But customers in most definitions do NOT need or want links.  They don't care.

And Agents can do links.

[Dimitar I_ Dimitrov]

Okay, and given that, again same question - for AGENTS, can you create a custom field of type REFERENCE without using an add-on, so that Agents can use it? I guess from everything we wrote here to streamline the use-case theoretically, we come down to the same answer technically - NOPE, there is no such feature in the core package, you need an add-on?:) am I right to think so?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

And, yet again, the same answer.  You don't need a custom field, use the links.