One of the most common problems that face developers is having too much unsorted data. They end up spending a lot of time categorizing reports so they can sort and identify issues properly. Instabug's Report Categories can save you from this. 

You can define a list of common categories for your users to select from while reporting a problem or suggesting an environment. Once you've set categorization options, your users will be able to choose how their bug reports are filed. 

Read on below to learn how it works and how to set categories from your Dashboard.

When the user chooses Report a Problem or Suggest an Improvement from the SDK menu, they will be presented with the list of categories you've chosen.
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Once they submit the report, it will appear on your dashboard with the category labeled at the top of the report.

Setting up categories is effortless. Everything can be controlled from your Instabug dashboard without any code changes to your application.

You can add report categories from your Settings menu. To do this, first expand the settings menu and choose "Report Categories."

You can then add a category under Report a Problem or Suggest an Improvement by selecting the Add Category button.

Categories can also be edited or removed by selecting the edit button.

For a more accurate and granular setup, you can add nested categories and build more detailed hierarchies. For example, the first level of categories can represent the main areas, features, products, or screens, in your app. Then, you may need to another level, to describe more detailed functionality within each one. 

Let's look at the following example:

Report a bug

Suggest an improvement

Ask a question

In your rules and filters, you can combine more than one condition together to make sure your logic applies to the reports coming from a specific path of selection. For example, you may want to forward the "Newsfeed bugs" to a different Jira project than the "Newsfeed improvements".

Whatever changes or additions you're making in your Report Categories setup might take up to 24 hours to be reflected in the already installed applications and will appear immediately in freshly installed applications. If you want to test how the categories look like in your application on the spot, make sure you uninstall the application from the device you're testing with and install it again.

As you can see, the Report Categories are built specifically to optimize triaging your bug reports on Instabug, help you take faster actions and make faster decisions.

In addition, there are best practices that can help you get the most out of categories, like filtering the reports by certain categories, automatically assigning reports in a specific category to the right team, or auto-forwarding a report to its relevant project using integrations. You can find out how to do these things here: Key Benefits of Using Report Categories