For most cases, you will be sequentially adding fields to a screen and users will fill them from top to bottom. However, there will be cases where your screen becomes over complicated and cluttered due to the sheer number of fields you need, or you simply want to have a way to logically group several fields together and separate them from the rest. This is where tabs come in.
If you think of screens as the entire form a user must fill in, then tabs will be individual pages or sections that make up the whole document. Tabs go from left to right, so it is a good practice to design your tabs to flow logically from left to right. For example, the first tab can gather general information, such as summary and description. Subsequent tabs will gather more domain-specific information:
You can add tabs to any screen in JIRA. In fact, by default, all screens have a default tab called Field Tab that is used to host all the fields. You can add new tabs to a screen to break down and better manage your screen presentation:
- Browse to the View Screens page.
- Click on the Configure link for the screen you wish to add a new tab for.
- Click on the Add Tab link and enter a name for the tab.
- Click on the Add button to create the tab.
Tabs are organized horizontally from left to right. When you add a new tab to the screen, they are appended to the end of the list. You can change the order of tabs by dragging them left and right in the list, as shown in the following screenshot:
You can also move a field from one tab to another by dragging the field and hovering it over to the target tab. This will save you some time having to manually remove a field from a tab and then add it to the new tab.
Just like screens, you can maintain existing tabs by editing their names and/or removing them from the screen. Perform the following steps to edit a tab's name:
- Browse to the View Screens page.
- Click on the Configure link for the screen that has the tab you wish to edit.
- Select the tab by clicking on it.
- Click on the Edit icon and enter a new name for the tab.
- Click on the OK button to apply the change.
When you delete a tab, the fields that are on the tab will be taken off the screen. You will need to re-add or move them to a different tab if you still want those fields to appear on the screen. You cannot delete the last tab on the screen. To delete a tab, perform the following steps:
- Browse to the View Screens page.
- Click on the Configure link for the screen that has the tab you wish to edit.
- Select the tab by clicking on it.
- Click on the Delete icon. JIRA will ask you to confirm whether you want to delete the tab and list all the fields present.
- Click on the Delete button to remove the tab from the screen.