Configure field layout in the work item
Choosing which fields appear on your team's work item, and which of those fields are most important, can help your team get more done in less time. The work item 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 work item. Project admins can set up the work item for projects to work best with their team.
Work item layout settings are for individual projects. You can't share layout settings between projects right now. But you can copy a work item layout to other projects that use the same screen. Learn more about copying a work item layout to other projects.
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 layout. When configuring the layout, there are three sections: description fields, context fields, and hidden fields.
Description fields
This section usually appears on the left side of the work item (or at the top in a single-column layout). Since this is the first place users look when they open a work item, 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 work item (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 work items. Each user can customize context fields to work for them by pinning their most used ones to the top of a work item 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 work item at all. When configuring the layout for a work item type, drag fields to the right side of the screen and drop them in the Hidden fields section.
Configure field layout
- Open a work item of the type you'd like to configure.
- Click Configure at the bottom-right of the work item (near the created and updated dates).
- Add, remove, and drag fields in the field categories until you're happy with the setup.
- Choose Save changes.
If a group of work types—tasks and subtasks, for example—use the same view work item screen, which they do by default, you'll configure the fields for those work types all together as a set.
Add fields and create field tabs
The available fields for a work item type are the ones added in the global screen configuration for viewing that work type. To add more existing fields to a work item 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.
Open a work item and click Configure at the bottom-right of the work item (near the created and updated dates).
- 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).
Add (or remove) the desired fields.
- Add, remove, and edit the field tabs.
Once you have tabs configured, they'll appear in the description section on the left side of a work item. Click the tab to see its fields.
- Field tab name
- Fields in the tab
- To make a field required, check out Specifying field behavior.
- To add fields that don't exist yet, see Create a custom field.