Issue templates

Issue template

Overview

An issue template files an issue that already looks the way your team expects. It pre-fills the title, the short description, the description document, and the properties — type, status, priority, team, project, milestone, assignee, labels, and estimate — so nobody has to remember which of them matter for a bug report.

There are two kinds. A standard template fills the composer in and leaves everything editable. A form template asks ordered questions first and builds the issue from the answers, which is what you want when the person filing does not know your property model.

Read Templates first for the rules that apply to all three targets: visibility, defaults, revisions, and what happens when a template names something that no longer exists.

Create a standard issue template

Where. Settings → Issues → Templates for the whole workspace, or Settings → Your teams → <team> → Templates for one team. Team managers can author team templates; workspace templates need a workspace admin.

What a standard template can set

Two absences are deliberate. Due dates cannot be set in a standard template: there are no relative offsets, and an absolute date baked into a template is stale the day after you save it. Ask for a due date as a form question instead. Sub-issues are not part of standard issue authoring — a project template is where seeded work lives.

Create a form template

A form template is the right choice when the information matters more than the properties: a bug report that must carry reproduction steps, an access request that must name a system.

Question types

The questions are asked inside the issue composer, beneath the ordinary fields, so the creator answers them and can still see and edit everything the template filled in.

Answers to everything except property questions are written into the issue's main document, in the order the questions were asked, under the label each was asked with. Instructions text is copied in too, so the context you wrote for the person filling the form survives into the issue.

Answer text is never interpreted as Markdown. Somebody typing # urgent gets the words, not a heading in your document.

Property questions

A property question binds an answer directly to the issue rather than to its description. Issue templates can ask for:

Title, Description, Type, Priority, Due date, Labels, Team, Assignee, Project, Milestone, and Estimate.

A property answer outranks the default you pre-set, so a form can supply a sensible assignee and still let the creator override it. Answered references are checked exactly like authored ones — an answer naming a project the destination team cannot see is reported, not applied.

Identifiers

Every question has an identifier, and answers are recorded against it. Renaming a question's label leaves recorded answers alone; changing its identifier does not, which is why the identifier stays fixed once the template is saved. The same applies to dropdown and checkbox choices: the stored value is what answers record, the label is what people read.

Use an issue template

Pick a template from the Template control in the issue composer, beside the team. The list shows what is eligible for the team you are filing into, grouped by visibility, with the workspace's templates first.

The other two routes reach the same place. ⌘K then New issue from template… opens the composer with the picker already open. A direct link copied from a template row opens it with that template preselected.

After a template is applied the composer says what it did — how many fields it filled, and anything it could not use here. If you had already typed something into a field the template also sets, Pulse asks which to keep rather than choosing for you.

Things a template will not force

A few values are deliberately left alone even when the template sets them:

• The team. The destination stays the one you chose in the composer. A workspace template used in two teams does not drag either of them somewhere else.
• A milestone from another project. If the template's milestone belongs to a project this issue is not going to, the milestone is dropped.
• Backlog inside an active cycle. An issue in an active cycle cannot be in the backlog, so that status is not applied.
• A short description, where the composer collects none. The value stays on the template; the composer simply has nowhere to put it.
• A description imported as Markdown. It cannot be inserted into the composer's editor, so it is left out rather than pasted in as plain text.

Default issue templates

A team can name the template its issue composer opens with, configured separately for two audiences:

• Members of the destination team, who get the full composer.
• Non-members, who are usually filing into a team they do not work in.

A form template can only be the default for non-members. Replacing a member's everyday composer with a questionnaire is a misconfiguration, and Pulse refuses it rather than applying it. If a form ends up bound to the member audience anyway, the composer opens empty instead.

Deleting a template that is somebody's default clears the binding. The composer then opens empty, which is the ordinary aftermath of a delete rather than an error.

Manage templates

Open the … menu on a template row.

Edit and Delete need authority over the template; Duplicate needs permission to create one. Copying the link needs neither, so someone who can only use a template can still share it.

Deleting tells you how many issues came from the template before it asks you to confirm, and those issues keep showing which template and revision produced them.

Visibility is changed by editing the template and using its Visibility control. That move does not mint a revision, but it does need authority over both the old and the new scope.

Converting between Standard and Form

You can change a saved template's mode with the Type control in the editor.

Standard to Form is lossless: the properties stay and you add questions.

Form to Standard is not. A standard template cannot ask anything, so text, long text, dropdown, checkbox, date, and upload questions are discarded. Pulse names exactly which questions would be lost and asks you to confirm before saving. Property questions and instructions survive, since a standard template can express both.

The revision before the conversion still holds the form, so the loss is recoverable by reading history even though the conversion itself is one-way.

Limits and errors

Two errors are worth recognising:

• Someone else saved first. The template changed while you were editing. Reload to see their version, then reapply your changes. Pulse refuses the save rather than overwriting somebody's work.
• This template cannot be used here. It is not available for the team you are filing into, usually because it is scoped to a different team.

FAQ

Next

• Estimates
• Project templates
• Request templates
• Templates overview