How can I hide transition comments from my customers in the customer portal view?

[Connor_Richardson]

I have a complex workflow for my Jira Service Desk, and I would like to hide certain comments on the customer portal view that confuse customers. I use automation to auto approve/decline which leads to comments that say "automatically declined" or "automatically approved", and I would like to remove these comments. I would also like to remove transition comments, that customers do not need to see.

How can I get rid of these comments?? I would greatly appreciate any help

[Petter Gonçalves]

Hello @Connor_Richardson

Thank you for reaching out.

Per your description, I understand you want to remove the comments added by default when you use the Jira Automation and also automatically hide all the comments made when an issue is manually transitioned. Is that correct?

About the automation comments, Atlassian has acquired a new automation tool that does not add those comments to Jira Service desk. Please, replace your current rules under project settings > Automation by the ones provided by the new automation tool, under project settings > Project automation.

About the transition comment, it is not possible to select a default value to the comment visibility, although we have a feature request to implement this option:

Default value for "Comment Viewable By" 

Feel free to vote and watch the suggestion to increase its priority and also receive notifications about any updates.

For now, we can only suggest you to instruct your agents to manually select the option to add an Internal comment when transitioning any issues:

Let us know if you have any questions.

[Connor_Richardson]

@Petter Gonçalves Thank you for the help! Is "Automation for Jira" free? It doesn't appear to be. "Automation for Jira - Server" has a list price of $22k per year

[Petter Gonçalves]

Hello @Connor_Richardson

Thank you for your answer.

Sorry, I didn't notice that you are using Jira Server. Indeed, Automation for Jira is not free in the Server version of Jira, only Cloud.

That being said, I'm afraid we don't have an option at this moment to hide the activity logs that you mentioned without the use of plugins or Javascript. The following feature request was created to allow this option in JSD:

Ability to Hide Status Change Log in Customer Portal

As we don't have a workaround for it, I kindly ask you to vote and watch the suggestion to increase its priority.

[Connor_Richardson]

@Petter Gonçalves Dang. I have one other question. When does Jira consider an issue no longer "Open"? is it when I set its resolution status to "done"? Does the resolution status have to be set in a post function?

[Connor_Richardson]

@Petter Gonçalves Also is it possible to create a name for a JQL Query and call the name of the query in automation? I use the same JQL query in several automation rules, and it's cumbersome to update every query when I need to make a small change.

[Petter Gonçalves]

Hello Connor,

Sorry for this late reply. Please, check my answers to your questions below:

When does Jira consider an issue no longer "Open"? is it when I set its resolution status to "done"? Does the resolution status have to be set in a post function?

It depends on which features you are talking about, so you must ensure that both criteria below are achieved to consider an issue resolved:

1 - Jira system JQL filters usually consider an issue to be done when they have any value added to the resolution field.

Although you can add different values to your resolution, this field works in a "boolean" way in Jira: The issue is considered to be resolved when the resolution is set with any values, and unresolved when no values are added at all. You can have more details about it in the documentation below:

- Best practices on using the "Resolution" field

As detailed in the documentation above, you can choose one of the two options below to set your resolution:

1. Create a post function in the last transition of your workflow, so the issue is automatically added with a resolution value when it gets to the status "Done"
2. Add the resolution screen to the last transition of your workflow, so the user agent/customer is able to set the resolution value for that issue. P.S: The resolution is a required field, so it can not be empty (Unresolved) if it is placed on the screen.

2 - Most of the reports of Jira boards do not use the resolution to consider an issue closed by the resolution field, but the position it is in the board columns. Basically, it considers all the issues placed in the most-right column to be done, so you need to ensure your "Done" status is properly mapped to that column under Board settings > Columns.

Also is it possible to create a name for a JQL Query and call the name of the query in automation? I use the same JQL query in several automation rules, and it's cumbersome to update every query when I need to make a small change.

You can use the filter parameter to call that specific JQL query in your automation rules. These would be the steps:

1.  Navigate to your issue navigator page > Create the JQL query you want to add to all your automation rules and save it
2. In the Automation rules, add the following query, updating 'yourfilter' with the name of the filter you created in step one:

   filter = "yourfilter"

Let us know if you have any other questions.

[Connor_Richardson]

@Petter Gonçalves Can you use scriptrunner to delete automation and transition comments on the customer portal? If so do you know what the code would be or what API allows you to access these comments?

[Kyle Cooke]

Hi Peter, 

Go to the Project Settings > Request Types > Find the request type that is associated with your issue type > Edit Fields. Change the tab to be Workflow Statuses.

Then change all the statuses to the default "Open" value, the customer won't get a notification when the value changes to Open, an example of ours:

[Connor_Richardson]

Unfortunately the transition comment, "Your request status changed to Open", is still posted when doing this

[Kyle Cooke]

That comment should only be posted if the status is changing from a different value.

On my example, we only have 3 public statuses that the customer is made aware of but multiple for ourselves.