Can I include last comment and last comment date in dashboards?

Question

I have created dashboards for the tracking of various types of initiatives - currently the scrum master is spending a lot of time chasing people for updates on their assigned items (yes, I know this is not how this is supposed to work but in my case it is not going to change).  One of the repetitive asks to the team is what is the update (last comment) and when was that update made (last comment date).  Is there a way to include these in dashboards without custom code?

Hannes Obweger - JXL for Jira · Answer

Hi @Steve Krummes

welcome to the community!

Just to add to @Bill Sheboy's great answer:

If you're open to solutions from the Atlassian Marketplace, this would be easy to do using the app that my team and I are working on: JXL for Jira.

JXL is a full-fledged spreadsheet/table view for your issues that allows viewing, inline-editing, sorting, and filtering by all your issue fields, much like you’d do in e.g. Excel or Google Sheets. It also comes with a long list of so-called smart columns that aren’t natively available, including the last comment, the last comment date, and many other comment-related columns.

This is how it looks in action:

As you can see above, you can easily sort and filter by your comment fields, and also use them across JXL's advanced features, such as support for (configurable) issue hierarchies, issue grouping by any issue field(s), sum-ups, or conditional formatting.

Any questions just let me know,

Best,

Hannes

Yuliia_Borivets__SaaSJet_ · Answer

Hi @Steve Krummes

You might check out the Activity Stream gadget. It provides a filter for comments and reflects dates.

Bill Sheboy · Answer

Hi @Steve Krummes -- Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

There are likely marketplace addon gadgets to display information like that, but nothing out-of-the-box.

As a workaround, and if are okay adding a custom field, you could try an automation rule.

* add a custom text field to the relevant project
* add an automation rule, triggered on Issue Commented to update the custom field with the date / time of the last comment, and perhaps an abbreviation of the text.  For example:* {{#issue.comments.last}}{{created.mediumDateTime}} -- {{body.abbreviate(100)}}{{/}}

* add an issue filter gadget to your dashboard, including a filter for the issues and selecting the issue key and your custom field.

Kind regards,
Bill