How to narrow down Redmine issues with a filter that searches the history of a field

Created on 2024-03-08 • KUROTANI Akihiro

(Supported versions: Redmine 5.1 or later / RedMica 2.3 or later)

You can narrow down Redmine issues with a filter that searches the history of a field. Use the filter operators "has been", "changed from" and "has never been".

Each operator searches as follows.

has been: issues whose current value or past value matches
has never been: issues that do not have the value now and never had it in the past
changed from: issues that were changed from the value to another value in the past

The "has been" operator

The "has been" operator extracts issues whose current value of the field matches and issues whose past value matches.

For example, you may want to find an issue that you remember handling as the assignee in the past, although you forgot details such as the issue number and the title. In this case, use the "has been" operator with the "Assignee" filter to extract the issues that were assigned to you in the past.

Extracting the issues that were assigned to a user in the past with the "has been" operator

The "has never been" operator

The "has never been" operator works in the opposite way to the "has been" operator. It extracts issues whose current value and past values of the field do not match.

For example, if you use the "has never been" operator with the "Assignee" filter, you can extract the issues that were never assigned to the user.

Extracting the issues that were never assigned to a user with the "has never been" operator

The "changed from" operator

The "changed from" operator extracts issues that were set to the specified value and were then changed to another value.

For example, you may want to find an issue whose status was set to "Closed" but was sent back for some reason and changed to "In Progress". In this case, select the "changed from" operator with the "Status" filter and specify "Closed" as the value.

Extracting the issues that were sent back from "Closed" to "In Progress" with the "changed from" operator

Note that the "changed from" filter operator extracts issues that were changed at least once in the past. "changed from" "Closed" does not mean "closed in the past and not closed now". It means "changed from Closed to another status at some time in the past". Therefore, the result also includes issues whose current status is Closed (after several changes from Closed).