Issues with querying a text field with value containing a dash

Question

I have a team-managed JIRA project that has a custom field named "Part Number". This field contains values with dashes. When I search using the queries below only a small portion show in the results. Sometimes when I run it, it shows all results. I rerun the exact same query and half the results disappear again.

"Part Number[Short text]" ~ "200-00126"

"Part Number[Short text]" ~ "\"200-00126\""

Hannes Obweger - JXL for Jira · Answer

Hi @Tomislav Cukar,

welcome to the community!

I assume that this is related to how Jira does its internal indexing for full text JQL searches; unfortunately, this sometimes leads to unexpected results when searching for non-letter characters.

This being said, if you're open to solutions from the Atlassian Marketplace, you'll find various apps that either extend JQL by additional functions, or provide their own, more powerful search mechanisms.

E.g., your use case would be trivial to solve using 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. One of the filtering options that is available for all fields is text filtering, which works as expected with all kinds of special characters.

This is how it looks in action:

For more advanced use cases, you can also use logical operators (AND, OR, NOT) as well as regular expressions.

I should also 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

Marc -Devoteam- · Answer

HI @Tomislav Cukar

Welcome to the community.

Text searching in Jira is not the best. Searching is always based on contains.

So:

* "Part Number[Short text]" ~ "200-00126" -> will find issues where part number contains phrase "200-00126" in no particular order
* "Part Number[Short text]" ~ "\"200-00126\"" -> will find issues where part number contains exact phrase "200-00126"

See documentation on searching, search-for-issues-using-the-text-field