Can the Comments field be added to a issues report?

[Donna Benton]

Looking for a report that will show these fields:

Key   |    Summary     |    Comments

How do I retrieve data from the Comments field in a report?

[Hannes Obweger - JXL for Jira · Accepted solution]

Hi @Donna Benton

to the best of my knowledge, comments can't currently be added as a column to Jira's issue views and reports.

The only built-in solution that I can think of is to use Jira Automation to copy the issue's comments (or parts of it) into a custom field (probably of type paragraph/multi-line text), and add this custom field to your issue view. You can create a rule that is triggered by a new comment action, and then use a expression like e.g. {issue.comments.last.body} to access the latest comment.

Alternatively, if you're open to solutions from the Atlassian Marketplace, there's more options available. I'll add more information below.

Hope this helps,

Best,

Hannes

[Hannes Obweger - JXL for Jira]

... and just to expand on the last point: If you're open to solutions from the Atlassian Marketplace, and/or don't want this to eat into your automation budget, you may want to have a look at 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 content, date, or author of the last or first comment, all comments, etc. etc. 

This is how it looks in action:

As you can see above, you can easily sort and filter by your smart columns; you can 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.

Of course, you can also export your data to Excel/Google Sheets or CSV in just one click.

This all just works - there's no scripting or automation whatsoever required.

Any questions just let me know!