Transfer existing Ticket descriptions to new custom field in Jira

[Sem H]

Hello everyone,

I'm currently facing a challenge within Jira Service Management, and I hope you can help me find a solution. My goal is to have a text ready in the custom portal's description (When a ticket will be created). Example:  I tried to achieve this by placing a standard text in the existing description field, but as I couldn't modify this field, I created a new one.

The issue arises when I hide the description field in the request form and add the new field. This works fine in the customer portal but not in the backend. The description field, containing all the information from old tickets, appears at the bottom of the page, thus hidden from customers, while the customer field remains at the top.

What I aim to accomplish is the automatic transfer of information from the old description field to the new customer description field for existing tickets, continuing to use the new field by default. Does anyone have experience with this or any idea about the steps I should follow to make this possible? Any suggestions or assistance would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you!

[John Funk · Accepted solution]

Hi Sem - Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

Create an Automation rule based on a Scheduled trigger. You can use whatever timeframe you want because it will be irrelevant.

For the Scheduled trigger add a JQL for: Description is not empty and "New Field" is empty 

where New Field is the exact name of your new custom field (including case). 

Then add a new action for Edit Issue

Select the new custom field and then click the 3 dots to the right and select Copy 

Click the text and change the "Field to copy value from" to the Description field. 

Save and Update/Publish the rule. 

Then click the Run rule now button. 

Note - you might want to start with a JQL for a single issue in the Scheduled trigger to test it first. Something like Key = ABC-123 where that is one of your issues you want to update. 

[Trudy Claspill]

Hello @Sem H 

Welcome to the Atlassian community.

If you want to copy information from an existing field in an existing issue to a new custom field you have added to the issue, you can do that using an Automation Rule.

https://support.atlassian.com/cloud-automation/docs/jira-cloud-automation/

Note though that there are limits to how many rule executions you can have in a month (see this documentation). For the Standard plan you are limited to 5000 rule executions per month.

Additionally there is a limit to how many issues can be processed in a single rule execution (see this documentation). For how many issues do you need copy the information?