JXL: The Description field doesn't support inline editing. Can you tell me why and how to fix it?

Question

The description field doesn't support inline editing. Can you tell me why? and how to fix it.

Like an Excel sheet, the cell of the description should be supported with a double click to edit its value with the inline editing.

The description field is the system field.  I need to resolve this problem.

Thank you.

Qasem O · Answer

Hello @steve_yang

when I am introducing project,I am does not know how to making it,just writing project name,so from multiple projects I cannot describing it,this what happening when naming project.

with respectful  for all hard working

Daniel Franz - JXL · Answer

Hello Steve,

Thanks for your post. I'm on the JXL team and can shed some light on this.

I'm assuming you're using Jira Cloud, but correct me if I got that wrong. In Jira Cloud and Jira Data Center, the rich text formats Atlassian uses differ. There’s ADF (Atlassian's proprietary format), wiki markup (also an Atlassian proprietary spec), subsets of HTML, etc.

Unfortunately, Atlassian still has not opened up their Editor component to third-party app developers like us. That's why, at this point, JXL does not render rich content inline in table cells. Instead, you see plain versions of these field values. It also doesn't offer inline editing for the Description field yet. As you might have noticed, copying and pasting between the cells works perfectly fine, and double-clicking them simply opens the issue view to work with Atlassian's own rich text editor there.

For multi-line text fields other than the Description field, e.g. the Environment field, or text custom field types, you can optionally use a JXL plain text editor. This is also not inline though, but opens in a smaller table dialog (which results in the same amount of clicks as if the issue view dialog were opened really). This basic text editor can only edit and save plain text, i.e. saving previously rich text would make it plain. Do you think having that as an option would help you? We could look into offering that for the Description column as well. If so, please get in touch with us at support.jxl.app so we can better understand your requirements.

We have planned to improve this, but it’s a very large piece of work, as we essentially have to develop our own ADF-capable rich text editor component. Even then, it won't be possible to work with media (images, videos, emoji, etc.) because Atlassian simply doesn't allow that.

I hope the current solution to edit this particular field in the issue view dialog is not too inconvenient.

Thanks for using JXL.

Daniel