pre fill the comment section on a transition screen

Gomez, Daniel

When a user transitions an issue, the transition screen pops up. On that screen I want the comment section to have pre filled questions in it that the user can respond to. This way those responses will show in the comments section when the issue is viewed later. Is this possible in jira cloud? Or is there a better approach?

Ste Wright

Hi @Gomez, Daniel 

As far as I know, not by default.

You'd need to look for an app which can handle pre-population of fields at a specific time in the workflow (rather than a default value) - an app like Issues Templates for Jira might do that - it's not something I've tried previously.

One option is to modify the description of the comments field. This is the text which appears under a field in classic view.

1. Go to Jira Settings > Issues > Field Configurations
2. Locate/Select the Field Configuration for the project
3. Search for "comment"
4. Press "Edit" on the right-hand side and modify the Description to note that questions A, B and C need to be answered during transition X - then press "Update"

^ The limitation with this approach is the description will appear in all screens where "comments" is. So if the comment field is in your edit screen, the text would also appear there.

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An alternative is to house the information in a separate custom field - or multiple custom fields (one per question).

A simple method would be to create a read-only field on the transition screen requesting users to answer these questions in the comments:

1. Go to Jira Settings > Issues > Custom Fields
2. Create a custom field - Text Field (read only)
3. Once created, from the custom field menu, locate the field and press the 3-dots icon on the right-hand side
4. Select "Contexts and default value". From here, select "Edit Default Value" at the bottom of the page and enter your questions/directions
5. Next, go to Screens from the left-hand menu
6. Add the field to your transition screen

Users could then copy/paste the questions into comments during the transition.

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If the questions need to be in the editable field - there is another option:

1. Go to Jira Settings > Issues > Custom Fields
2. Create a custom Text Field (multi-line) and give it a name - eg. Questions
3. Once created, from the custom field menu locate the field and press the 3-dots options icon on the right-hand side
4. Select "Contexts and default value". From here, select "Edit Default Value" at the bottom of the page and enter your questions
5. Next, go to Screens from the left-hand menu
6. Add the field to your transition screen
7. Then, locate all the screen(s) where the field needs to be visible on the issue itself. You could add the field to all screens as long as you want users to be able to modify it during transition or before/after. I would personally just add it to the View screen so it's only editable during the transition.
8. If you choose the separate screen, you'll need to create a new screen for view, add the field and then modify the screen schemes and issue type screen schemes. See more on how this works here
9. After this, go to Field Configuration from the left-hand menu
10. Locate the field configuration(s) for the projects this transition screen is utilising. Click into each one and locate the Questions field
11. Select "Renderers" from the right-hand side and change to "Wiki Style Renders" - to enable rich text formatting

^ This (in theory) should provide a new field in the transition screen with questions populated, which is only visible on the issue once populated during the transition.

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Not perfect solutions, but options without an app!

Ste