Search discrepancy with summary and description fields

Question

Here is the issue I’m seeing:

If I search two words (or more) and tell JIRA to check the summary and description, I’m not getting results I expect. If I search for the words “up” and “down” , if the word “up” is in the summary and the word “down” is in the description, it won’t return the issue. It will only return an issue if “up” and “down” are both in either the summary or the description.

In theory I can do an advance search to cover the four combinations of results. This is an extremely messy solution however and if I want to search three words, I then need 9 different combinations, and so on.

Ideally what I’d like to do is concatenate the description and summary then search that one field for the two words. I however have been unable to find any way to do that in an advanced search, not sure if it is possible or not.

Thanks,

Pascal Gauthier2 · Answer

Hello Tor,

Thanks for the reply, however that will only give me a result where both words occur in the summary or both words occur in the description.

What I want is a query (without making a matrix) that will return results where one of the words is in the description and the other word is in the summary.

Tor Flatebo · Answer

You are going to want to use this type of JQL to be more explicit:

(summary ~ "up" AND summary ~ "down") OR (description ~ "up AND description ~ "down")

Pascal Gauthier2 · Answer

Looks like my problem was in the explanation.

I only want a result where “up” AND “down” are included.

The query sent was an OR. It will return up or down, which isn’t what I’m trying to do.

Here is what my JQL looks like:

(summary ~ "up AND down" OR description ~ "up AND down")

Just looking at the JQL I can see where the problem is. It will find (up AND down in the summary) OR (up AND down in the description). It will not find up in the summary AND down in the description, that would evaluate as false based on the JQL