Is there a way to link to a specific section/area within a comment?

[Michael Hart]

I know that you can link to comments using the "Copy link to comment" button, but I am interested to know if there is a way to link to a specific section or area within a comment, the way that you can in Confluence with "Copy Link to Heading".

Example: confluence-url-link-to-page#Subheader-in-the-page

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Example comment: User makes a comment with a format like this:

Summary

This is the summary of a comment

Description

The comment goes on to describe something in greater detail. There are multiple sentences within this section.

Image

(An image is attached)

Questions

A question is asked within the comment

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Example response: I want to link to a specific section of their comment, because they may have written out several paragraphs and included many images in their comment.

Hello (name),

Regarding the image you may want to try clicking the other button.

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I'd think this is built into Jira comments somehow or another; it's rudimentary HTML to link to specific headers. Am I just missing how to do this? Or, is it actually not built into Jira comments?

[Bill Sheboy · Accepted solution]

Hi @Michael Hart 

It appears the parameter to select a specific comment, focusedCommentId, is used by the page to scroll to and highlight the comment...even when it is not yet visible due to comment paging.

And so, depending upon your browser support, you could try using the text fragment highlighting and see what happens.  I did a quick test with Chrome and it seemed to work.  For example:

myJiraURL/browse/ABC-123?focusedCommentId=12345#:~:text=describe%20something

Kind regards,
Bill

[Michael Hart]

@Bill Sheboy , Ah, thanks for the tip! That does seem to kind of work.

(I'm required to use Edge at work, so take this as you will.) The interaction I end up seeing is something like this:

• If I click the link
  • Nothing happens
  • I would have expected the page to auto-scroll down, to the relevant section
• If I right-click -> open in new tab
  • It scrolls down to the correct section and the header is highlighted in pink.
  • After a second or two, focus is snapped upward towards the middle of the comment.

I think it'd probably be enough to get the point across. It's just a little disappointing that I would have to manually type in something like this each time.

whatever-url#:~:text=header%20text

Maybe I can make a macro for it or something. Or just keep notepad handy. Haha. :)

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For anyone curious:

One of the other use-cases I have for something like this is when making a series of tests. There is a fair amount of repetition, with minor changes tweaks throughout, so it's fairly common to have testing instructions something like this (but much longer):

Test Case 1

1. Do the thing
2. Click the button
3. Click submit

Test Case 2

1. Repeat steps 1-2 from Test Case 1
2. Click cancel

Test Case 3

1. Repeat steps 1-2 from Test Case 2
2. After canceling, start the thing again
3. Click submit repeatedly

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The hope is/was that being able to link / reference between test cases would make the process slightly less painful to read.

I had even considered splitting test cases out into individual confluence pages for that reason, and linking to the pages, but it was decided that keeping everything "as self-contained as possible in Jira". "The problems are described in the work, the PRs are linked to the work, the Dev Notes are documented in the work, so, the tests should be comments in the work." I get where they're coming from, but it feels like there's a lot of functionality missing in the comments field.