Introduction

For an issue tracking application, the more details you can provide about an issue, the better. JIRA helps by giving us some standard issue fields that are most likely to be used when creating an issue. But what if we need to capture additional information such as the name of the reporter's dad or something else that is worth capturing, perhaps the SLA or the estimated costs? For this, we can make use of custom fields.

JIRA comes with a group of predefined custom field types. These include types such as number field, user picker, and so on, which are most likely to be used by JIRA users. But as you become a power user of JIRA, you might come across the need for a customized field type. That is where people start writing custom field plugins: to create new field types or custom searchers.

We will use this chapter to learn more about custom fields.