Global search?

Question

Would like to find every single instance of the word 'contact' throughout all projects.

Ie., I would like to search all project names, all issue summaries in all projects, and all fields in all issues in all projects (such as description etc) for the key word 'contact'.

This possible?

Amanda Byrne · Answer

Is there no way to impact what this global search considers?

My biggest issue is that I can't search by the "Key" field, which seems like a massive thing to overlook - the whole purpose in having the key field is to serve as a simplistic, but unique way to define a specific record.  And I can't use the number in that key to return it in a search?

actually, just discovered that if I include the prefix when I search instead of just the number, I do get the result.. (but now there's no way to remove this post)

DT_vo037l · Answer

I appreciate that, thank you.  I've ascertained that the toolbar search is a global search through all projects, which searches both the title/name and description.

The 'all projects' and 'backlog' searches only search the titles/names, and 'issues' searches the description.

I couldn't get 'text ~ contact' to work on any of them

Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Answer

Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

Jira has one (possibly more since I last looked at the code) generic search phrase that goes across fields.

text ~ contact

will search all the text-based fields for the word or phrase you give it.   It is, however, a fuzzy search, so while you might be glad to see it finds some minor misspellings of what you are looking for, it may return some false positives.

It also only looks at text-based data.  Summary, description, comments, labels, short or long text fields by default, but also any custom field that is set to use a "text searcher" (I've only seen a couple of custom field types provided by apps that do that, I mention it mostly for completeness).

It will not find select fields (single, cascading, or multi-select, fields, or radio-buttons, checklists from an app, or check boxes.  These all use lists of options which Jira does not see as "text")