How do I enable Rich Text editing within Jira Assets attributes?

[Caleb Youngblood]

I'm working within Jira Assets and am trying to create an attribute for an object that allows the user to input rich text information. This Atlassian resource indicates that the field Textarea "contains a larger section of text with a maximum of one million characters, including line breaks and formatting. You can use the Assets rich editor to customise the content." 

I have tested this field out, and there is no rich editor present that the user can access to customize the content. How is this enabled? 

[Kevin Patterson]

Hi @Caleb Youngblood - I believe the Atlassian document is incorrect in the description of a "rich editor". I've tried several different types of formatting and markup commands in TextArea and nothing seemed to work. There are a few older community posts that I've seen from time to time where this comes up and the community consensus is that TextArea is a plain text field. Some of these posts go all the way back to the days when Assets was called insights. here is an older post for reference: https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-Service-Management/Rich-Text-enabled-in-Textarea-attribute-for-Jira-Insight/qaq-p/2093078

Out of curiosity can you share more details about your use case for this field to contain rich text vs plain text?

[Caleb Youngblood]

Thank you for your response. Glad to hear that I'm not alone in this problem. 

My use case is the following. We maintain 600+ objects and are all subject to testing procedures. I would like to create a field for documented test procedures that include bolded text, italics, bullets, and inline links. These test procedures would be relatively short (less than 250 words). 

[Kevin Patterson]

I understand what you are trying to do, Having the inability to markup the text to highlight important details is not helpful. At the moment I can't think of a workaround that would allow you to have marked up test procedures short of writing the procedures in a confluence page and then referencing that confluence page as a link in an asset attribute (this is not ideal and will introduce more friction into your use case in my opinion).  I looked for an enhancement in Atlassian's system and found one still open to enhance text area with a rich text editor but it was for data center https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JSDSERVER-8412 logged back in 2021. 

[Caleb Youngblood]

Yeah, definitely. I did find one workaround right now to copy and paste HTML into the field using a text to html converter. Not pretty, but works.