Rules and fields

What a rule is

A rule belongs to one project and one issue type. It holds a list of fields with the value each one should get. There is at most one rule per project and issue type pair; saving again replaces it.

The rule is applied when the Create dialog is open for that project and issue type. Smart Defaults only fills the dialog: nothing is created until the person clicks Create, and existing issues are never changed.

Supported fields

The editor lists the fields that are on the create screen of the chosen issue type and that the app supports:

Field	Value you enter
Summary	Text, up to 255 characters
Description	Text, up to 32 767 characters — see formatting
Priority	One of the priorities
Assignee, Reporter	A person, or the current user
Labels	One or more labels: no spaces, up to 255 characters each
Components, Affects versions, Fix versions	One or more of the existing ones
Due date	A date, or a relative date
Custom fields of these types	Single select, radio buttons, multi select, checkboxes, cascading select, number, single-line text, multi-line text, date picker, date time picker, URL, single user picker, multiple user picker

Not supported: Forge custom fields, any other field type, and any field that is not on the create screen of the issue type. A date time value must include a time zone; the editor adds your browser’s offset.

Replace a value that is already filled

By default a field is filled only if it is empty. Turn on Replace a value that is already filled for a field to overwrite what is there. This is needed for values that Jira sets itself — Priority always starts with a system default — so the option is on by default for Priority and off for other fields.

A field counts as empty when it has no value, when Assignee is Automatic, or when the description has no text.

Current user

For people fields (Assignee, Reporter and the user pickers) you can choose Current user (who creates the issue). The value is stored as {currentUser} and replaced with the person who opens the Create dialog. It works only as the whole value of a people field, not inside text.

Dates

For date fields choose a relative date: {today}, {today+7}, {today-1}. The date is calculated in the browser when the dialog opens, in the person’s local time, and is entered as YYYY-MM-DD. The shift is a whole number of days with up to four digits.

The same tokens work inside text values — Summary, Description and text fields: Weekly report {today} becomes Weekly report 2026-10-15.

Description formatting

In Description and multi-line text fields you can use simple markup, which is converted to Jira’s rich text when the field expects it:

You type	You get
`# Heading`, `## Heading`, `### Heading`	Headings
`- item` or `* item`	Bulleted list
`1. item`	Numbered list
`bold`	Bold text
An empty line	Paragraph break

What can prevent a field from being filled

The field is no longer on the create screen — it is skipped and the other fields are still filled.
A select option, component or version in the rule has been deleted in Jira — that value is skipped and the others are still filled. Without this check Jira rejects the whole set of values.
A person hid the field with Show fields in the dialog. According to Atlassian’s documentation, hidden fields are not passed to UI modifications.
The field already has a value and Replace a value that is already filled is off.

Resync

On the Settings → Apps → Smart Defaults page, Jira administrators have a Resync button. It deletes the UI modifications the app created in Jira and creates them again from the saved rules. It repairs a mismatch, for example when a UI modification was deleted by hand. The rules themselves are kept.

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