Announcing project/fields association improvements for company-managed projects

[JamesPetty]

Hi @BarbaraSchwarzwaldDe, thanks for your questions, see responses below:

1. I see some potential for user confusion with this additional level of association between fields and projects, especially with the functionality overlap with Contexts. This will add another possible answer to the question of “why does my field not show up in my work items?”.

Explicit field associations doesn’t add an extra level to the existing model for fields and contexts. It simply slightly changes what field configurations represent. It is the field configuration that represents the field association, you will be able to add and remove fields from field configurations which currently isn’t possible.

2. At the moment, I’m a little confused as well due to the slightly contradicting definitions

See my answer above these aren’t changing, we’re just changing how field configurations are used. They now represent the fields that are associated with a field configuration scheme and by extension associated with all the projects used by the scheme.

3. How will this affect the Default User flow for customers when creating fields?

The UI will be overhauled as part of another upcoming release to improve the flow of creating a custom field and allowing them to be associated where needed. For now new fields will continue to be added to all field configurations. However this will be changing on 1st Jan 2026.

4. Is this part of or will this interact with upcoming changes/overhaul of custom field contexts? (see the Mar 2025 update in this issue: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRACLOUD-6851 ).
   As context already “associate” a custom field with projects in a way, there seems to be significant overlap there to me.

This change is a prerequisite of the work being done on custom field contexts. This is part of the “foundational/refactoring work that needs to be done ahead of enabling this feature” that is mentioned in the latest update on that JAC.

[AndreasEbert]

@JamesPetty, thanks for confirming this, although this is not the response I hoped for.

I can see in my EAP-enabled site that the hide locked filter is working now, yes.
What I don’t yet see is that locked fields can be added or removed to a field configuration. I guess that is still to come, even in an EAP-enabled site?

Fyi, as a consequence of this constraint to customfields, we are considering moving away from a Forge customfield and instead implementing an Automation Action. Our app’s main use-case is with Automation anyway.