Create forms to intake work in a Jira project
10 min
By the end of this lesson, you'll be able to:
- Create forms to track requests
- Associate different forms with different work types
What are forms in Jira?
In Jira, forms help your team create and intake work in a structured, consistent way.
👉 For example: Ihor is an event coordinator. Other teams frequently request his team's support in emails, messaging apps, and meetings. Ihor creates a form for his team to send to anyone requesting help. This provides a simple, standardized way for the team to begin planning their work.
👉 Another example: Becky's development team often gets requests from other teams to update their part of the codebase. Becky creates a form to ensure that these teams always fill out the fields her team needs when requesting changes.
Forms make it easy for your team to keep track of who needs your support. When someone wants to request something from your team, they can fill out the form. When they click Submit, a work item will be automatically created in your project.
👇This is how a form appears to users.
Forms are available in Jira business and software projects.
Forms are also available in Jira Service Management, but they have a different purpose. In service projects, forms are primarily intended for intaking requests from external customers through a portal.
Some project templates have forms by default, but a project admin can also add or remove them from your project.
To add forms to your project:
- Navigate to your project.
- In project navigation, select Add to navigation (represented by a +).
- Under Views, select Forms, then click Add to navigation.
- If you want the Forms section to appear in a different place in your project navigation, drag and drop it to the desired place.
👇Add forms to your project navigation.
Create a form in Jira
Each form is connected to a work type, like Story. You can have multiple forms for the same work type, but you can't use the same form for multiple work types.
👉 For example: Adeline wants to create three forms for stakeholders to submit work to her project: Request a content review, Request a consultation, and Request new content. She wants each form to create a task in her team's project, so she associates all of these forms with the Task work type.
👉 Another example: Jesse wants to create a form with the same fields for the Task and Story work types. He can’t use the same form for two work types, so he creates two identical forms and associates one with the Task work type and one with the Story work type.
You can add any system and custom fields in your project to forms. However, if a field isn't available for the work type you select, it won't be available for that form.
👉 For example: Ryu creates a form for the Bug work type. He wants to add the Priority field to it but doesn't see it available on the form. When he checks the layout and field configuration for the Bug work type, he realizes the Priority field isn't on bugs in his project, so he can't add it to this form yet. First, he has to add the Priority field to the Bug work type.
To add a field to a form, make sure it's available in the layout and field configuration for the work type you choose.
👇For a field to be available in a form, it needs to be available for that work type in your project settings.
In team-managed projects, you can create fields directly in your forms because project admins can create fields without a Jira admin’s help.
Only project admins can create and edit forms.
To create a form:
- Open your project.
- In the project navigation, select Forms.
- Under Create a form, select a template to start with or select Blank form, then a work type.
- At the top of the form, edit the name, help text, and permissions as needed.
- To add a field to your form, in the Fields area, select a field, then drag and drop it to the form area.
- To remove a field from your form, select a field, then drag and drop it to the Fields area.
- To reorder fields, select a field, then drag and drop it to a new place in the form.
- To add a description to any field, click in the Add a description area and enter your description.
- To make a field required, select it, then enable the Required toggle.
Your changes apply automatically. When you're done, you can preview the form in a new tab.
👇 Here’s how to preview your form.
Share forms with stakeholders
Once you've set up your forms, you and your team can share them with relevant stakeholders. The easiest way to share a form is to open it and copy the link.
👇Users in your project can open forms in the Forms area. Only project admins can edit forms here.
By default, the form is only open to users who can create work in your project; this is called Limited access. You can change this to Open, which means anyone who can log into your site can create work using that form.
👉 For example: Mariana works on a content marketing team. She wants the rest of her organization to be able to submit ideas for content to her team using forms. She creates a Content idea form and sets its access to Open so that teams across her site can submit content ideas.
👉 Another example: Brad works on a design team that partners with three other teams. Brad's team only wants these partner teams to be able to create work items using forms, so he sets the form's access to Limited. He also makes sure that the partner teams have access to create work items in his project's settings.
If you set your form to Limited access, you have to grant Browse project and Create work items permissions to anyone you want to submit the form.