How to bulk hide multiple custom fields in a field configuration
Platform Notice: Data Center Only - This article only applies to Atlassian products on the Data Center platform.
Note that this KB was created for the Data Center version of the product. Data Center KBs for non-Data-Center-specific features may also work for Server versions of the product, however they have not been tested. Support for Server* products ended on February 15th 2024. If you are running a Server product, you can visit the Atlassian Server end of support announcement to review your migration options.
*Except Fisheye and Crucible
Summary
There are scenarios where the Default Field Configuration has too many custom fields that need to be hidden.
Clicking the Hide button several times can be done on a few custom fields, but if there are hundreds or thousands of custom fields to hide, a viable option would be to do it using database queries instead.
Ultimately, the best way is still to avoid creating unnecessary or duplicate custom fields in the first place and to make sure to consult with teams before creating a new custom field to avoid this situation.
Environment
Tested on Jira 8.13.
Solution
Hiding multiple custom fields in a field configuration can be done using direct database updates.
Changes to Field configurations from the database side will only show up on the UI after a restart of Jira.
Always back up your data before performing any modifications to the database. If possible, test any alter, insert, update, or delete SQL commands on a staging server first.
The steps outlined on this article are provided AS-IS. This means we've had reports of them working for some customers — under certain circumstances — yet are not officially supported, nor can we guarantee they'll work for your specific scenario.
You may follow through and validate them on your own non-prod environments prior to production or fall back to supported alternatives if they don't work out.
We also invite you to reach out to our Community for matters that fall beyond Atlassian's scope of support!
Find the ID of the
fieldlayoutyou want to modify. Review the contents of this table to do so:1select * from fieldlayout;You may follow up with this query to see what is available on this field layout:
1select * from fieldlayoutitem where fieldlayout in (<fieldlayoutid>);This query will hide necessary custom fields instead on the database. This query was tested on a PostgreSQL database for the field configuration with <fieldlayoutid>. You'll still need to have a pattern for the custom fields you want to hide or alternatively you may replace the last line below with
fieldidentifier in ('fieldname1','fieldname2','fieldname3').1 2 3 4update fieldlayoutitem set ishidden = 'true' where fieldlayout = <fieldlayoutid> and fieldidentifier like '%customfield%';The change won't show up on the UI until a restart of Jira is done. However, the field configuration can be copied to a new field configuration. The new field configuration would have the custom fields hidden as a result.
Was this helpful?