How can I hide categories with no open issues in List View
Asked by Darko J:

Hello everyone,

we have a Team managed project that we use for tracking issues on our work. We categorise our work by projects we work on and then we use the List view with the Group by: Category option to group the issues for easier visualization and issue creation.

So each Category is a project our team works on. The problem we are facing now is that we have a bunch of finished projects with all issues closed, but the categories still appear on the List view making it very crowded.

My question is, is there a way for us to hide the categories from the List view when there are no open issues in them? Deleting categories is not a preferred option because we would like to keep this connection for future references.

If hiding categories is not possible I would be happy to hear suggestions on how one would set up a project to fit our way of work.

Best regards,

Darko


Answers:
author: Valerie Knapp
body: Hi [@Darko J](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/1764973) , thanks for your question.

It is possible to hide the categories column, but I am not sure if that is what you want -

![image.png](https://community.atlassian.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/282862i4D2673779FEDE960/image-size/large?v=v2&px=999 "image.png")

It is also possible to hide, by default, done items like this, which might be better for what you are trying to achieve -

![image.png](https://community.atlassian.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/282863i6B005869ADAD7330/image-size/large?v=v2&px=999 "image.png")

Please can you give some feedback if this helps at all? If not, either I or someone else can try to assist further.

Cheers

comments: author: Darko J
body: Thank you very much for your reply,

this is an example, here I have 3 tasks that belong to Category 1, 3 and 8:

![jwm_tasks_1.png](https://community.atlassian.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/282873i7A2C35EB8DF45FD7/image-size/large?v=v2&px=999 "jwm_tasks_1.png")

But when I Group by Category I see every category, from 1 to 8, even though there are no issues in them - or in my real case all issues are Done:

![jwm_tasks_2.png](https://community.atlassian.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/282872iBED49B38BE637620/image-size/large?v=v2&px=999 "jwm_tasks_2.png")

I would like to hide Categories that are empty (either do not have issues, or have all issues in Done state)

BR


author: Valerie Knapp
body: Hi [@Darko J](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/1764973) , thanks for your response.

Would filtering instead work? I think I have not really understood what you want to obtain.

![image.png](https://community.atlassian.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/282919iE335560AB35F8F23/image-size/large?v=v2&px=999 "image.png")

In this way, you could filter to see only the issues that have a category, or that have no category. You could, for example, have a process where when something is finished, you remove the category, and then you could filter for the issues still associated with the categories to see what is still being worked on.

Please let me know if this helps.

Cheers


author: Darko J
body: Hi [@Valerie Knapp](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/4929946) ,

thank you for your help. I think that there is no way to make it work exactly as I want, but I am thinking of implementing a process similar to what you suggested, with the use of an additional custom field.

While our work is in progress we will be using Categories because of the useful grouping option in the List view, and after the work is done we are going to change the Category to "Archive" or something similar. We will be using the custom field to keep track of which Category the issue belonged to before we moved it to the archive. This way we will have the list view a little bit cleaner but we will still be able to keep track of where the issues belonged to while we worked on them.

It's not the most user friendly way but it will do the job.

Best regards,

Darko


author: Hannes Obweger - JXL for Jira
body: Hi [@Darko J](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/1764973)

I just had a look into this on my personal site and it indeed seems like empty categories are shown as groups. I assume that this is intentional (as it allows you to e.g. create new issues within a group even if the group is empty), and I'm not aware of a way to change this. I'm afraid you'll have to raise a feature request with Atlassian Support.

Best,

Hannes

comments: author: Hannes Obweger - JXL for Jira
body: Also, I don't know if this problem justifies additional tooling for you, but just to put this out there: If you're open to solutions from the Atlassian Marketplace, this would work as expected in the app that my team and I are working on, [JXL for Jira](https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/1224710?hosting=cloud&tab=overview&utm_source=atlassian-community&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=2488084).

JXL is a full-fledged spreadsheet/table view for your issues that allows viewing, inline-editing, sorting, and filtering by all your issue fields, much like you'd do in e.g. Excel or Google Sheets. In a sense, it has a few things in common with Jira's native list view, however it comes with a range of advanced features, and also works in (and across!) projects of all types, not just business projects.

Plus, grouping by category (and any other field(s), for that matter) would only show groups for values that actually exist in your set of issues!

![group-by-category-v2.gif](https://community.atlassian.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/282935iEFDBF614521987E7/image-size/large?v=v2&px=999 "group-by-category-v2.gif")

Any questions just let me know,

Best,

Hannes


author: Darko J
body: Hello [@Hannes Obweger - JXL for Jira](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/4289506)

your product looks great, thank you for the suggestion!

Best regards,

Darko


Tags: cloud

jira-work-management-cloud