How do you write a query for checking if a field only has a whitespace character?

Geoff Wilson

USE CASE NEED:

• To return a list of Defects that do not have an External ID (i.e. "External ID" is EMPTY)

PROBLEM:

• External ID could have been accidentally given a whitespace character, and this should be treated as it still being EMPTY
  • So how do you write a JQL query that returns the list of defects if it is Empty or if it only has whitespace?

 

The initial JQL query, without solving the problem, is:

issuetype = Defect and "External ID" is EMPTY

I can't figure out how to have that as an OR where it checks if it's empty or if it just has whitespace characters

Jonny Carter_3nm6du

You could get these results using ScriptRunner for JIRA's issueFieldExactMatch script JQL Function.

issuetype = Defect and ("External ID" is EMPTY OR issueFunction in issueFieldMatch("", "External ID", "^\\s*$"))

The above would find any issues where the contents of the field was only whitespace, or the field was empty. You could use more elaborate regular expressions to search for single-character entries and the like.

In fact, if you had a pretty good idea what the format of your External ID field should be, then you could write a query to find every issue where the External ID field did not match the expected format.

issuetype = Defect AND NOT (issueFunction in issueFieldMatch("", "External ID", "^external ID regex goes here$"))