How to concat changes on the custom field textbox?

[Eva]

So this has been an annoyance for almost a year in my project and I dont even know whyy I never ask this question here! So we have this free-form text box that capture all the notes, when we transition the workflow, this textbox get updated by different teams. It works fine when you update the ticket one by one, the problem/annoyance happened when we try to use bulk edit - the field show up in bulk-edit seems to be emptied out. And when we use bulk edit, the text that was in the field before would seems to be replaced by bulk-edit's edit.

I think there is got to b a way to concat changes, so I would liek to see what are my options or if it is omsehting that was fixed in later releases (using JIRA 4.4 right now).

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

It's not changed, and I'm not sure it ever will, as it's probably not a bug.

When you edit a field in an issue, you are shown the current value for the field, and your edit overwrites the existing data. Even though you might think you are adding to a text field, you are not, you are replacing the current values. You just happen to have the current text in front of you when editing, and your change is based on that.

Only the "comments" are added to in bulk-edit, because those are a list of separate comments, not a single data value.

If you changed this behaviour, then you run into problems. What happens when you want to replace instead of add and replace? Why is it suddenly different from other fields, where the behaviour is (and should be, and in many cases, has to be, replace)?

You'd need to rewrite the bulk-edit process so that it asked the user if they were doing normal edits or appending, for each text field. While there, you'd also need to ask about multi-select and check-boxes...