How to print JIRA 5 data entry screen with fidelity to fields on tabs

Question

Starting with JIRA 5, when you are in issue edit mode, and have an issue type with multiple tabs, it is no longer possible to print the issue and get a printout that reflects what the user sees on the screen.  This is because apparently the code that renders to a printer does not treat the field layout onto tabs in the same way as the renderer to the browser screen.  See attached examples.

My organization really depended on being able to print the different tabs in order to get feedback from users, do training, and print documentation. The current ability to print pages is useless if the pages have tabs, because the printed page has no resemblance to the tabbed interface the user actually sees during data entry.

Screen prints are a possible solution until you get too many fields and the form becomes too long for a single screen, at which point it becomes a lot of work to stich together multiple screen prints.

I am currently working on SQL queries to reproduce the capability that used to exist in JIRA 4 and prior.  I wonder how others are dealing with this loss of functionality?  Is there a good workaround that I am overlooking?

Midori · Answer

Use the PDF View Plugin to print your issues, and you will never see this problem again. Plus you'll have much better quality printout than printing the browser's content.

This add-on does not rely on the browser and its rendering and page breaking capabilities, but transforms the underlying data (tabs and custom fields) to printable documents.

See some samples in the top part of this page.

Larry Talley · Answer

Thanks to support staff this has been entered as a development issue at:

https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRA-28071

Prior to JIRA 5, it was possible to print the data entry "tabs" of a JIRA project and have printed pages that looked very much like the data entry "tabs" do on the screen.

With the release of JIRA 5 Atlassian "broke" this feature.  JIRA 5 and subsequent releases print all of a screen's fields without respect to which "tab" the field appears on.  With relatively small (few fields) tabs, you can of course use screen capture and print the image... but, with tabs that have many fields and require vertical scrolling, printing screen capture images is at best a messy solution.

Since we know that the vendor already owns code that prints these the way we want them printed... it seems like it should only be a matter of getting some votes for the issue to get that code put back.  (Perhaps though some slightly different button or drop-down menu so we don't break the new behavior!)

Please consider voting for issue JRA-28071.

Larry Talley · Answer

Sorry Nic, but, it did work much better in JIRA 4 and earlier.  I'll attach "screenshot-1" which was captured from a JIRA 4 instance.  Sure the printout ran for multiple pages, and was a bit messy, but, when you asked your browser to pint the current page, and you were on a JIRA edit-issue tab, it would only print the fields that were on that tab, and it would print them in the order that they appear on the screen.  That was exactly what I would have expected my browser to do, and it met a number of needs.

The way it works in JIRA 5 (print page pays no attention to tabs) is much less useful because if you are using tabs on the screen you would expect the printout to follow suite.