Ranking Reports

Ranking fields may be set up by the administrator.  A ranking field is used to indicate the relative importance of each issue in a collection, for example as part of a product release cycle, indicating the order in which issues may be tackled.  Ranking fields may have filters as part of their definition.  These filters allow great flexibility, for example to set different rankings for different users.  You might for example rank, or order, all the issues assigned to you as part of a product release cycle.

Rank fields may have been placed on add and edit layouts as well as on reports, and may be manipulated in all these places.  However, they really come into their own when you view the collection of issues and their rankings together on a column report.  Assuming you are running within a workspace, you can drag any issue within the collection to a different spot, and the rankings are automatically updated to reflect the new position in the report.  When you edit a rank field on an edit screen, the updates to the ranking will still occur, but you do not have visibility of the ranking of all the other issues in the collection.  To set up a ranking report, use the following procedure:

  • Create or modify a column report within a workspace.  You must be within a workspace to enable drag-and-drop to alter the ranking of the issues within the report
  • Place the fields you wish to see along with your ranking field on the report.  If you have access to more than one ranking field, only place one on a report, else the results you achieve when modifying a ranking will be ambiguous
  • Set the sort order of the report to be the ranking field, ordered ascending
  • It is advised to set the number of rows being displayed on a report page to a number higher than the total number of issues on the report output.  You cannot drag issues from one report page to another, only within a page
  • Save and then run the report
  • If the rankings have not been set at this moment, the ranking column will not have any values.  If the rankings have been set, then you will see the ranking field for the first issue with a value of 1, the second issue will have a value of 2, etc.
  • Drag-and-drop the issues within the report.  As you do so, the issues will aiutomatically reorder, showing the rankings in an ascending numeric order.

Ranking Report Editor

Ranking Report Output Showing an Issue Being Dragged

Note the Ranking field in ascending order on the report output.  The screen shows an issue being dragged and dropped to a higher position.  Once dropped, the rankings to all of the issues less than the one on which the issue is dropped will be reordered. 

Note: A change to the ranking order does not cause any entries in the history of an issue.  The audit fields are not subject to the normal audits.  This is because during an ranking session, there may be thousands of updates to the database.  These changes have no real value.