How to search text fields that contains several "-" (minus sign)

Question

Hello,

I have a custom text field named "[NC] Number" in English and "[NC] Numéro" in French. It contains info like this DMC-NX-YYYY-MM-AA-Issue#, so for examples: "DMX-NC-2024-06-18-CAT-99", "DMX-NC-2024-05-10-DOG-45", "DMX-NC-2023-02-09-BIRD-19" are possible texts. I want to make a search in a filter like "DMX-NC-" or "DMX-NC-2024" but i can't obtain any results. How can I perform search in my filter?

Didier Lamard · Answer

Thanks Hannes,

But for the time being my company doesn't want to purchase additional plugins. Anyway we have some workarounds like "DMX*NC*" for this field and "A-BBB-CCC-DDD" for general searches

Best

Hannes Obweger - JXL for Jira · Answer

Just to expand on the last point: If you're open to solutions from the Atlassian Marketplace, you may want to have a look at the app that my team and I are working on, JXL for Jira.

JXL is a full-fledged spreadsheet/table view for your issues that allows viewing, inline-editing, sorting, and filtering by all your issue fields, much like you’d do in e.g. Excel or Google Sheets. It's text search and filtering uses a different technology than JQL, meaning that you can use any special characters, like so:

For more advanced use cases, you can also use logical operators (AND, OR, NOT) as well as regular expressions. (I should add that JXL can do much more than the above: From support for configurable issue hierarchies, to issue grouping by any issue field(s), sum-ups, or conditional formatting.)

Any questions just let me know,

Best,

Hannes

Hannes Obweger - JXL for Jira · Answer

Hi @Didier Lamard

welcome to the community!

I believe this doesn't work because of how Jira does (or rather doesn't) index certain special characters; see e.g. this page for reference.

You can of course always export your data and search through your export, but I understand that this isn't particularly convenient. Alternatively, if you're open to solutions from the Atlassian Marketplace, there's a number of apps available that either extend JQL by additional functions, or use their own, non-JQL search and filter mechanisms. I myself work on an app in which your use case would be trivial to solve; I'll add more information below.

Hope this helps,

Best,

Hannes