Export Jira Service Management tickets with only external comments

[Zsuzsa Galicza [Midori]]

Better Excel Exporter for Jira already has a default template to export issues with comments. You can read about it here.

But let’s go further than that. In some use cases, customers want to export Jira Service Management tickets with only external comments. In other words, they want to hide internal comments and exclude the agent discussions when generating a customer-facing Jira Service Management report.

In Jira Service Management you can create internal comments. For example, if you use Service Management for customer support, you can create internal comments that your colleagues can see, but not the customer. This capability is useful for agents helping each other, discussing a potential solution, link previous tickets about the same problem, or discuss relating matters.

When you export these issues, you don’t necessarily want to see these internal comments in the export – for example, if you’d like to give the export to a customer.

Here I would like to show you how you can customize the default issue-navigator-with-comments.xlsx template to not include these internal comments in the export. Don’t worry even if you don’t usually do things like customizing Better Excel Exporter templates, it is very easy.

Customize the Excel export template to hide internal JSM comments

1. First, download the issue-navigator-with-comments.xlsx template.

In Jira Cloud, go to Apps -> Better Excel Exporter -> Excel templates. Choose the download icon on the right hand side.

Open the file once downloaded.

2. Clear cell B2.
3. Copy this and paste to cell B2:

<jt:forEach items="${xlsContent.commentsRawByIssue(issue, false)}" var="comment">${comment.authorFullName}

How does this work?

To understand a bit of what you are doing, in the expression

${xlsContent.commentsRawByIssue(issue, false)}

the "false" means that you don’t want the internal comments exported. This give you further options to customize the template to your needs. If you change "false" to "true" like this:

${xlsContent.commentsRawByIssue(issue, true)}

The internal comments will be exported with the rest of the comments, just like in issue-navigator-with-comments.xlsx.

4. Once you’ve overwritten B2 with this code, save the template with a fitting name like issue-navigator-with-comments-no-internal.xlsx.
5. Upload it to the Excel templates.
6. Apply this new template to an existing Excel export option (Excel view) or create a new one for just this.
7. Go ahead and give it a try!

Please note that unfortunately the JSM Cloud ticket queue screen doesn’t permit apps to be embedded, so you have to export from Advanced issue search (Issue Navigator).

I hope it helps to export your JSM tickets without internal comments.

Try Better Excel Exporter and feel free to ask questions below or reach out to the Midori support team!