Searching the Custom Field Library by text in the Custom Field Description

Need: Allow the Custom Field Library search function to parse the contents of a Custom Field’s description.

Example: We have a team that needs to create a significant amount of custom fields.
They also need to be able to easily find their custom fields in the Library.

One solution is to add a team name/acronym to the Custom Field Name.
However, this adds clutter to the Custom Field Name that is displayed at the top of the columns on their projects (horizontal space is already at a premium in list view, with multiple custom fields displayed).

I tried adding the team name/acronym to the Description of the Custom Field.
However, when you search the Custom Field Library, and enter that unique team name/acronym, it does not come up in the search results.

Proposed Solution: Make the text contents of the Custom Field Description available to the Custom Field Library Search tool, so they are included in the search results.

This would allow these Fields to be quickly located, without adding extra characters onto the Field Name, and cluttering up display options. (Especially in situations where multiple team names/acronyms may be desired, due to overlapping team needs.)

Example Solution:
Custom Field Name: Wolverine
Custom Field Description: Present in X-Men and Deadpool

Searching for either ‘X-Men’ or ‘Deadpool’ team names would return this custom field as a result that they would want.

Hi @Jesse_Messerschmidt ,

Can you clarify the syntax of how your field names are made up?

A couple of notes: Spaces or dashes “-“ are needed to separate words. this_name won’t be found by searching name as it sees the word starting with this.

What seems to work for us is the following syntax: <fieldname> (<region>-<department>) and then use abberviations for revions/departments.

When you’re really pressed for space an emoji might also do the job, but if you use it as a suffix you don’t need to have the column so wide to see the entire name.

Curious to get your response.

Hi @Jan-Rienk -
Some of the field names made by team members are a bit long, so adding things to the end of them just makes it longer.
The search function works fine to find the words in the Field Name, but if we were able to get search results including the Field Description, the Field Names could be shortened.

Thank you for the suggestion!

1 Like