How can I get text to display in the description of a new ticket to act as a guide before saving?

Question

We are trying to add standard text for people that create new tickets in Jira. We are currently using the Automate feature to get the text to show up in a new ticket description section but the problem is, it's only displayed after you create the ticket.

Does anyone know how to get the text to display as soon as the person hit's the Create button (before the new ticket is saved) so they can use it as a guide when filling in a new ticket?

We want to make sure the required information is there in the description from the beginning and having it display only after the ticket is created, isn't ideal.

Thank you for your help and I hope there is a way to do this!

Diana von Ballmoos · Answer

All my questions are always long ongoing discussions :D .

Thank you @Frederik Vantroys for the help. Custom fields are too much of a hassle for free text like steps to reproduce, expected results etc, we don't need fields for those. For us we need it as a reminder of what information is needed (it's just titles of the sections and then the user would fill in the info below).

I was hoping we wouldn't need to use an add-on to implement this as it should be something that is easily configurable directly in Jira. With add-ons it might force changes to all projects and this isn't so easy to manage :( .

Trudy P Claspill · Answer

Hello @Diana von Ballmoos

Welcome to the Atlassian community.

If you are working with issues in a Company Managed project you can't set default text directly for the Description field. There is a work around you can implement using a custom field. The full solution is described here:

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-questions/Default-text-for-Description-field-on-Jira-Cloud/qaq-p/785597

If you are using a Team Managed project, you can set default text for the Description field through Project Settings > Issue Types.

Frederik Vantroys · Answer

That is a long ongoing discussion.

One of the arguements not to use templating for tickets is that you can end up with a lot of tickets that only have the boilerplate standard text and no actual content :-)

You could standardize tickets by adding custom fields foir info that needs to be filled out.

But ... if you want to there are a few (free or paying) add ons in the marketplace.

examples:

https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/1219112/easy-templates-for-jira-issues?hosting=cloud&tab=overview

https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/1229162/issue-templates-agent-for-jira?hosting=cloud&tab=overview

https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/1228993/issue-template-for-jira-summary-description-templates?hosting=cloud&tab=overview