Board Card Colors - Visual Status
A Jira board can colour its cards from JQL queries. Out of Office Assistant publishes each person's absence as searchable fields, so a card can carry a colour for as long as the person it is assigned to is away, and lose it again when they are back. Nobody has to edit the work item.
Card colours set up before the Forge upgrade have stopped working and have to be edited by hand. The field names lost their dots: assignee.outofoffice.today is now assignee.outofoffice-today. A query still written the old way does not raise an error. Jira accepts it and matches nothing, so the colour never appears and the board reads as though nobody is away. Nothing flags it; you have to open each colour rule and look.
What you need
A board in a company-managed space. Team-managed boards do not offer query-based card colours.
Permission to edit that board's settings.
People with out of office rules. Until someone is away, every one of these queries matches nothing.
Add the colour rules
In the sidebar, find the board under its space and select the ... beside its name.
Select Board settings.
Expand Layout, then select Card colors.
Set Select method to Queries.
Select Add card color. Pick a colour, enter the first query below, then select Add color.
Repeat for the second and third query, in the order given.
Open the board and check a card whose assignee you know is away.
What the colour marks | Query |
|---|---|
The assignee is out today |
|
The assignee is out tomorrow |
|
The assignee is out soon |
|
The same fields also take the reporter prefix, so reporter.outofoffice-today = 1 colours cards by whoever raised them instead. JQL Filter Configuration Guide lists every field the app publishes, including the ones holding the first and last day of an absence, and what each one returns.
The first matching query wins
Jira gives a card the colour of the first query in the list that it matches, and stops there. This matters because someone on a multi-day absence is out today and out tomorrow at the same time, so their cards match more than one of these queries.
Keeping the order above - today, then tomorrow, then soon - means each card shows the most urgent state it qualifies for. There is no need to write exclusions into the queries to keep them apart.
Give the first query the strongest colour and work down from there, so the board reads without a legend beside it.
If the colours do not appear
Check the query spells the field with hyphens. A dotted name is the single most common cause, and it fails silently.
Run the same query on its own in a work item search. If the search returns nothing, the problem is in the query or in who has rules, not in the board.
Check the person is genuinely out of office, not simply the owner of a rule that is limited in scope. Limiting a rule to spaces or a JQL filter decides which work items it acts on, not whether the person counts as away. JQL Filter Configuration Guide covers that distinction.
Related pages
Migrating from Connect to Forge - the full list of old field names against their replacements, and how to find the queries that still use one.