Private and Public Issue Fields

In YouTrack, you can mark a custom field as Private. Only users with specific permissions can read and/or update such field.

Privacy is set by the Private field property, which you can set when you create or edit the custom field. To view and update a private field, a user must have Read private fields and Update private fields permissions, respectively.

We hope that the example below will help you understand the concept more clearly.

Example for Private Fields

Use case

Your company has deployed a software installation for a particular customer. You want customers to be able to log in to YouTrack and create issues, but only want them to view and update specific fields, such as Priority and Affected version and add and view attachments. Customers should be able to view, but not update, the State field.

Other fields, like Type, Assignee, and Fix version should only be available for project developers.

Solution

Create a new project for the customer.
Create a group for the project assignees, and assign this group the default Developer role for the new project. Check that the Developer role has enabled Read private fields and Update private fields permissions. These permissions are enabled by default. If you have previously edited the default roles and have changed the set of permissions, you can create a new role for the project developers, but make sure that in addition to all other permissions they have permissions to view and edit private fields.
Create a list of assignees for the project.
Create a group for customer users, and assign them the default Reporter role for the project. Make sure that the role does not have Read private fields and Update private fields permissions.
Now, mark the necessary fields as private. In this case, the fields are Type, Assignee, and Fix version, which are intended for developers only.

Make a Field Private

This task requires attention and accuracy: the access type is a global setting for a field, and cannot be changed at the project level. That is, if you use the same field, for example, Priority in several or even all projects in your YouTrack instance, then making a field private affects ALL projects that use the field.

If you have the same scheme for all your projects (for example, in all your projects you want to restrict customer's access to issue fields like in our use case), then you can make the shared field private. If your projects differ significantly from each other, the better option is to create new fields for the project, and make them private.

To make a field private:

Open the Administration > Custom Fields > Fields List tab.
Select the field you want make private.
In the toolbar, click Make private button.
Click the Save button.
Repeat the procedure for all fields you want to make private.

Essentially, that's it: now your customers are reporters in the project and can create issues, but can only see and update public fields. All other fields are only available to the developers.

Last modified: 18 April 2017