Conditional Lists SpiraApp Released: Let's You Handle Dependent Dropdown Lists

20-Mar-2025 by Adam Sandman Product News

We’re excited to announce the release of the Conditional Lists SpiraApp, an advanced add-on for SpiraTest, SpiraTeam, and SpiraPlan designed to give customers more flexibility and configurability in their project workflows.  It lets you conditionally control what values are available in one list dropdown, based on the selected values of other list fields. In other words, changing one list dynamically updates the options in other lists. For example, an incident of type "Enhancement" could have its owner field limited to a certain group of users, but an incident of type "Bug" could have the owner field limited to a different group of users. The SpiraApp is highly customizable using the product settings to meet a variety of different use cases.

Background

Customers have asked us in the past for ways to control the values that are in the various dropdown lists inside Spira. Often known as "dependent dropdowns" or "connected lists" this functionality lets you tailor the data fields in Spira to better meet a specific process. We will discuss some example use cases shortly, but in general the functionality helps streamline the user experience and guide users as to which data elements are allows based on other items they have selected.

Sample Use Cases

Lets consider two common use cases:

1. Platforms and Browsers

When a user is logging an incident or recording a test run, you often will want to ask them which Operating System (OS) and web browser they were using. It's common to use Spira custom properties for this purpose:

When a user logs a new incident they have two independent dropdowns that display a list of all platforms and web browsers:

However this has the problem that a user may accidentally choose an invalid combination (e.g. Safari and Windows or Edge and iOS).

Using this SpiraApp, we can limit which web browsers are displayed, based on the chosen OS:

With these rules now in place, when a user chooses different OS platforms, the list of web browsers will be customized. For example, if you choose Mac as the OS:

Whereas if you had instead chosen Windows, you would see:

This greatly improves the user experience as well as reducing incorrect data entry and preventing ambiguous test results.

1. User Assignments

Consider the case where you want to ensure that different types of backlog item are assigned to different users. For example, we want different types of requirements to only be assigned to certain members of the project team. To achieve this we can use the SpiraApp to setup rules that link the possible artifact owners to the type of requirement:

This means that when you create a new requirement, if you choose the type 'Feature', you will see the following users listed:

Conversely when you change the type to 'Epic', you will see the following users instead:

If you choose a different type that is not covered by any of the rules, the full project list is displayed:

This functionality works the same way for other artifact types such as incident, task, and risk, so you can use it for any of the artifact workflows to limit the owner based on a specific field value. You can similarly limit the values in a user custom field for other types of artifact review. This makes setting up a multi-step approval workflow easier and more controllable.

How Do I Get Started?

  1. Download the App:

  2. Install on Spira:

  3. Activate and Configure: