Combining priority label ordering and manual ordering in issue board lists

• Currently you can manually re-order issues in a board list.
• Some users that use priority labels also want their lists to respect priority labels in a list.
• This is useful if a list has a large number of issues, and they already have priority labels assigned to them.

Design

• Given two issues, A and B, define a comparison operation between them to determine sort order in an issue list.
• If A was previously ordered higher than B manually (by dragging), then A appears higher than B.
• Otherwise, look at the priority labels in A and B. The issue with the higher priority then is higher in the list.
• In summary there is a precedence for sorting in issue boards with this feature. The higher precedence is manually repositioned issues. The lower precedence is priority labels.
• We should have some UI in the issue board that indicates that in EE boards, the sort is determined by two factors. And in CE boards, the sort is determined by only one factor.

@ClemMakesApps @jschatz1 : Can you see if this would satisfy one of your requirements for using boards to do scheduling?

@smcgivern @vsizov : What's the technical feasibility of this? Some of our users / potential customers have been asking for this. I recall that when issues first appear on the board, you are automatically assigning a manual sort order even before the user does anything. Would we need to change that to achieve the desired feature here?

changed the description

changed milestone to %Next 3-6 months

added Discussion UX frontend ~579550 labels

added EE Starter label

cc @cperessini

Can you see if this would satisfy one of your requirements for using boards to do scheduling?

@victorwu yes, this would satisfy one of those requirements. I'll create a separate issue to track what requirements we would like to have on gitlab before we can use gitlab for FE scheduling

marked this issue as related to #3043

mentioned in issue #3043

@victorwu Let me explain what we have now and why. If you have some number of issues that have priority labels and you go to the board list you will see that issue is ordered by priority! In fact, we already respect that priority order! But here is an unexpected thing, we need to be able to sort issues manually and this is why we automatically set relative position according to initial order (by priority). At this point, when you load the issue list again the relative position will take precedence over priority. Every newly added issue (from board UI) will be added to the bottom of the list. So the issue you refer to is that if you set priority order outside of issue board you would like it to be respected but it won't, as when we go to issue board again this issue will be positioned in the end as it doesn't have a relative position yet. If you have created several issues with priority labels (outside of board) and then go to the issue board then you will see that their priority order will be respected only across this newly created set but all of them will be lower in the list than all the already positioned issues.

To add to Valery's great explanation:

• If A was previously ordered higher than B manually (by dragging), then A appears higher than B.

• Otherwise, look at the priority labels in A and B. The issue with the higher priority then is higher in the list.

The problem is that 'any priority' is higher than 'no priority', and after the first load, everything has a priority.

I think we could make an option where you could sort manually within label priorities, but that seems pretty confusing.

Thanks @smcgivern @vsizov for the explanations. I didn't even think about the case of when you add a new issue, it sticks it to the bottom problem. (Actually should be the top I think? I have an issue somewhere for that.)

Anyways, it seems that this could get quite confusing really quickly. What do you folks think about totally separating the two use cases? So some users care about manual re-ordering their board lists. In this use case, there's a small number of issues per list. And they want granular re-ordering. For other users, they are a large number of issues per list (think GitLab). And they do management of priority through priority labels. So the proposal is a simple toggle somewhere per board (persisted, or maybe stored in a cookie). And if you've toggled to the option that uses priority labels explicitly, it only respects that, and ignores the manual re-ordering positions.

cc @cperessini

@victorwu If we made it configurable, I imagine it'd need to be persisted so everyone using that board would get the same behavior.

I'm not sure it makes sense to make this a setting. It would be hidden under the board dropdown and users (who are not board admins) would easily end up using boards that work differently without knowing why.

If we don't make it a setting, my instinct is to go with this approach @smcgivern mentioned:

I think we could make an option where you could sort manually within label priorities, but that seems pretty confusing

It's not confusing to me, though, so I'd like to know what other people's opinion is on this approach. I'm sure we can highlight the 'groups' created by the use of priority labels inside a list, and add indicators when trying to reorder issues.

If we made it configurable, we could provide all the existing sort options from the list view, couldn't we?

@smcgivern that's true, but wouldn't that affect what the next user saw when they loaded the page again?

@cperessini sorry, that was a general observation, not a reply to your comment

I think it's probably less confusing to save this on the board, rather than sorting within label priorities, because that will change existing boards.

As a user I would like to see some UI switcher to change the way it's ordered.