I know this has been requested by others in the past with no fruition, but I find myself needing to ask for it now.  One of the things I like about Lighthouse over the very complicated and expensive other bug tracking systems I've used and evaluated is that it achieves so much of what I need with so little and stays simple -- so I resisted making this request until I needed it enough that I'd likely have to switch to another solution, which is the point I'm at now.

Tags can be used (to varying degrees of success) where custom fields would be used in other issue tracking systems, and we have done so.  However, there is a class of information that can't be adequately represented this way.  For example, we track our time for billing purposes in another system, and so we need a way to know which billing project a given Lighthouse ticket should be associated with.  If we could create a custom field (say, "billingProject") then we could do the following:

* have this information in a uniform place in each ticket
* search for tickets which do or do not have a billing project associated with it (so that one can be assigned, or perhaps to consider those which do not have one to be lower priority)
* use the API to automatically populate that field or pull from that field


I don't think this can be adequately solved using existing Lighthouse functionality.  The options I can see are:

1.  Use tags
Problems:
  * Our billing system is dumb, and generates long and crazy project IDs
  * There are lots of billing projects, so there would be hundreds of these tags to wade through

2.  Just put it free-form in the description or a comment
Problems:
  * Unless we force a rigid notation convention (like "Billing Project:  <asdfdsfasdf-8484>" on a line by itself or something), we can't search for the presence of one, nor pull them easily with the API.



Or am I missing a solution?

Thanks.