Choosing which fields appear on your team's issues, and which of those fields are most important, can help your team get more done in less time. The issue view's design enables great flexibility in where you place your fields. If there are a few fields you fill out for every bug, for example, it makes sense that those fields are always visible and somewhere near the top of the issue view. Project admins can set up the issue view for projects to work best with their team.

Issue layout settings are for individual projects. You can't share issue layout settings between projects right now. But you can copy an issue layout to other projects that use the same screen. Learn more about copying an issue layout to other projects.

  1. Description fields: Since this section is the first place users look when they open an issue, your most important fields should be configured here.
  2. Field tabs: If the issue layout's screen is configured with more than one tab, they'll show up here.
  3. Context fields: Fields above the hide when empty line in configuration appear here in the Details group. Each user can pin their most important context fields into the Pinned fields group depending on what works for them.
  4. More fields: Fields under hide when empty are placed in this group when they don't have a value. When they have a value, they'll appear in the Details group.
  5. Configure issue layout: Click Configure to change the position and visibility of fields in the issue view.

Your Jira admin creates fields across your Jira site. And, they make those fields available to project admins through Jira's administration settings and project configuration schemes. Learn more about how Jira admins create fields.

Project admins can configure how these fields look in their projects by setting up their issue layout. When configuring your issue layout, there are three sections: description fields, context fields, and hidden fields.

Description fields

This section usually appears on the left side of the issue (or at the top in a single-column layout). Since this is the first place users look when they open an issue, put your most important fields here. If your layout's screen is configured with more than one tab, the other tabs will appear in this section. Only Jira admins can configure tabs (project admins can't change the order of the fields displayed in the tab). Learn more about configuring a screen's tabs and fields.

Context fields

This section normally appears down the right side of the issue (or at the bottom in a single-column layout) in the Details and More fields groups. Context fields usually contain secondary information that your team might need to sort, filter, or report on issues. Each user can customize context fields to work for them by pinning their most used ones to the top of an issue in the Pinned fields group. Learn more about pinning fields.

Hide when empty

The context fields section has a divider you can use to sort always-important fields from sometimes-important ones. Fields above the hide when empty are shown in the Details group and those below the line are hidden under the More fields group when they don't have a value. When a field in the More fields group has a value, it moves to the Details group.

Hidden fields

This section is for fields that you don't want to appear on the issue view at all. When configuring the layout for an issue type, drag fields to the right side of the screen and drop them in the Hidden fields section.


Configure issue field layout

  1. Open an issue of the type you'd like to configure.
  2. Click Configure at the bottom-right of the issue (near the created and updated dates).
  3. Add, remove, and drag fields in the field categories until you're happy with the setup.
  4. Choose Save changes.

If a group of issue types—tasks and subtasks, for example—use the same view issue screen, which they do by default, you'll configure the fields for those issue types all together as a set.

Add fields and create field tabs

The available fields for an issue type are the ones added in the global screen configuration for viewing that issue type. To add more existing fields to an issue type, or create and manage field tabs, you need to visit that global configuration screen.

You need to be a Jira admin to complete this process.

  1. Open an issue and click Configure at the bottom-right of the issue (near the created and updated dates).

  2. Click the link to the appropriate screen configuration at the top of the page. (If there are existing tabs in the configuration, you can also click the tab name and then Edit fields & tabs).
  3. Add (or remove) the desired fields.

  4. Add, remove, and edit the field tabs.

Once you have tabs configured, they'll appear in the description section on the left side of an issue. Click the tab to see its fields.

  1. Field tab name
  2. Fields in the tab


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