We need to be able to report on Comments

[Doug Zirbel]

We want to use Jira for project tracking.  The most convenient way for those of us working on a project ("Issue") is to add a Comment about its status at the end of the week.  Then we could generate status reports with additional color/explanations.  But it seems the only way to get around this deficiency is for us to manually add some comment text (plus our user name and time stamp) in the Notes filed, then parse them with some other program e.g. VBA.  Since Comments is field in Jira, shouldn't it be accessible in Export and the "View all issues and filters"?  Please add this as an enhancement to Jira.  Thanks.

[Trudy Claspill]

Hello @Doug Zirbel 

Your post is months old, but I wanted to follow up to see if you had found a solution. And if you haven't I wanted to ask some follow up questions as follows:

1. Are you working with Jira Cloud or Jira Server/Data Center?

2. Are you working with only the Jira Core product, or do you also have the Jira Software product enabled?

Note that Comments is not a single field in Jira as issue can have multiple Comments. Each comment is an entity with multiple fields (i.e. author, date, content).

Depending on your answers to the above, there may be methods available to you for accessing the Last Comment added to the issue and using that in your reports.

[Doug Zirbel]

Thanks Trudy.  We are on Jira Server, Jira v9.2.0.  I'm not sure which Jira product is installed.  Here's a list of libs:

• atlassian-image-consumer (com.atlassian.image:atlassian-image-consumer:1.0.1:jar)
• carol (carol:carol:1.5.2:jar)
• carol-properties (carol:carol-properties:1.5.2:jar)
• datafile (datafile:datafile:1.3.3:jar)
• image4j (org.jclarion:image4j:0.7:jar)
• jcaptcha (com.octo.captcha:jcaptcha:2.0-alpha-1:jar)
• jcaptcha-api (com.octo.captcha:jcaptcha-api:2.0-alpha-1:jar)
• jcommon (jfree:jcommon:1.0.8:jar)
• jfreechart (jfree:jfreechart:1.0.13:jar)
• JSCalendar (1.0)
• jStyleParser (net.sf.cssbox:jstyleparser:1.16-atlassian-1:jar)
• jStyleParser (net.sf.cssbox:jstyleparser:4.0.0:jar)
• SpotBugs Annotations (com.github.spotbugs:spotbugs-annotations:4.2.3:jar)
• TinyMCE-TinyMCE (5.10.3)
• xapool (xapool:xapool:1.3.1:jar)

Plus Advanced Roadmaps for Jira v9.2.0.

So it sounds like "Comments" is a collection of individual comment objects in the Jira codebase.  

Here's the background - As a manager, I want to get comments from JQL so that I can generate a weekly (draft) work summary for my manager.  I would then manually read through the multiple comments from each of my directs and then summarize them for my weekly highlights summary.  For me this would be huge.  If I could also tag (or ask my team to tag) certain important/summary comments, that would be even better/make my job easier.  And at the end of the year I could likewise write a year-end summary.

[Trudy Claspill]

With native Jira functionality JQL can be used to search for issues based on criteria. When you have the issues selected, you can export the results to Excel/CSV or other formats. When choosing what to export, if you choose All Fields then each Comment should also be exported. Refer to

https://confluence.atlassian.com/jiracoreserver0902/working-with-search-results-1168853081.html#Workingwithsearchresults-Exportingyoursearchresults

The native functionality provides an option to select issues based on the text in Comments. This would look through all the Comments in each issue for a match. Refer to

https://confluence.atlassian.com/jirasoftwareserver0902/advanced-searching-fields-reference-1168851842.html#Advancedsearchingfieldsreference-CommentCommentsComment

With third party apps that extend JQL you could also search for issues based on the Comment Author and Comment Created date.

With third party apps you might find additional reporting capabilities for extracting the Comment information.

Have you looked at the Atlassian Marketplace for third party apps that could help with this reporting?

[Doug Zirbel]

Thanks Trudy.  We're not permitted to get any 3rd-party apps, but I could export to Excel and write a VBA program to parse and transpose the multiple comments.