Summary

This article presents a way to change the names (descriptions) of many select options at once in Jira. If the amount of option names to change is not "big enough", you should opt for the UI approach of renaming individual options one by one, instead.

Please note this is not about changing the selections or Ids of the options — only their displayed names.

Environment

All versions of Jira Core 8.x.

Solution

The solution consists of 3 major steps:

1. Identify the records to update
2. Update the records
3. Flush the cache

Note you should run all steps for each environment you work on, as the database records ids may be different.

1) Identify the records to update

With the custom field id, run the following query on the database (example id 10300):

select cf.customfield, cf.id, fcs.configname, cf.customvalue
from customfieldoption cf 
join fieldconfigscheme fcs on fcs.id = cf.customfieldconfig 
where cf.customfield = 10300 
order by fcs.configname, cf.customvalue;

 customfield |  id   |   configname   |    customvalue     
-------------+-------+----------------+--------------------
       10300 | 10200 | Example scheme | Old option A
       10300 | 10201 | Example scheme | Old option B
       10300 | 10202 | Example scheme | Old option C
       10300 | 10203 | Example scheme | Old option D
       10300 | 10204 | Example scheme | Old option E
       10300 | 10205 | Example scheme | Old option F
       10300 | 10206 | Example scheme | Old option G
       10300 | 10207 | Test           | Another option
       10300 | 10208 | Test           | Yet another option
(9 rows)

Notice all field configurations will show up.

2) Update the records

Based on the ids returned from step 1, you may write the update commands you need:

update customfieldoption set customvalue = 'New Option A' where id = 10200;
update customfieldoption set customvalue = 'New Option B' where id = 10201;
update customfieldoption set customvalue = 'New Option C' where id = 10202;
update customfieldoption set customvalue = 'New Option D' where id = 10203;
update customfieldoption set customvalue = 'New Option E' where id = 10204;
update customfieldoption set customvalue = 'New Option F' where id = 10205;
update customfieldoption set customvalue = 'New Option G' where id = 10206;

Again mind the ids are from the desired options and field configurations.

3) Flush the cache

After the database changes have been completed, you should flush Jira's cache to avoid confusion as the previous option names will still show up.

The safest and often quickest way to do this is to perform a Jira restart.

a) Jira restart

A Jira restart will rebuild all the caches from the database again, including the ones from CachedOptionsManager that we're interested here.

If you're running Jira Data Center, you may perform a rolling restart (one node at a time) to avoid outage and this will suffice. The caches from CachedOptionsManager are local to each node and not copied over from running nodes upon restart (like the user and group caches, for example).

b) Cache flush through apps

Some apps have built-in scripts or features to flush cache. This works the same as option b and a restart is still the best option.