Practical JIRA Plugins

Chapter 4. Custom Field Searchers

Overview

The previous chapters discussed how custom fields work in JIRA. This chapter covers how searching for values in custom fields works, along with an example of a custom field searcher for the Currency custom field type that was created in A New Custom Field Type. All the source code for the examples in this chapter is available from https://marketplace.atlassian.com/41293.

When you configure a new custom field in JIRA you specify a name for the field and choose a custom field type. At the same time you can also optionally select a search template so that you can search for issues with a given value in the field.

For example, when you add a new custom field of the standard type “Multi Select”, the default search template is named “Multi Select Searcher”. This searcher is what controls what you see when you’re searching for issues in the Custom Fields section of the top-level Issue Navigator page. There may be more than one searcher available for each custom field type. If you select “None” for the searcher, then you won’t see any reference to this field in the Issue Navigator search fields.

When creating a new custom field type such as Currency, you may well be able to reuse an existing searcher. For example, a custom field type that just formats some text in a different way can probably reuse the “Free Text Searcher” class that’s already defined for the standard JIRA Free Text custom field type. Alternatively, you may want to create a new searcher ...