How to increase size of Summary Field in jira 4.3.2

[Kapil Bolli]

Hello ,

I am using jira 4.3.2 ,i want to increase size of summary to unlimited text (FREE) like Description Field of JIRA or greater than 255 characters.

Thanks

Kapil

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted solution]

That's a LOT of coding, for something you probably don't really want to do.

On the human side - the whole point of a summary is that it's a relatively short manageable block of text that summarises why there is an issue raised. If you change it to long text, you'll instantly find it becomes useless as a summary, because it's now a description, people will use it as a description, and it's no longer a summary. Can you imagine being in a standup/meeting and reading out a short essay so that people know what you're talking about?

On the technical side - you'll need to rewrite some bits of Jira to do it. The backend connection to the database should be quite simple - modify the database column to be longer and investigate the code to handle it. But then summary is used in the code in a number of places, off the top of my head, you'll need to fiddle with the searching code and get-data-from-database-and-feed-to-display at least. Then you need to think about the actual display - if someone puts an essay into the field, you'll need to think about how you handle that on-screen. The issue navigator would be fine, you'll probably want to tweak the issue view a little as you'll get massive blocks of text in the header, but I'd be quite concerned in other places where summary is a handy on-screen reference for the users. Subtasks, tooltips and links will look awful unless you fix them somehow. And I've not even looked at Greenhopper...

[Kapil Bolli]

Hello Nic,

Thanks a lot .I understood the impact of it .

I am migrating issues from Non Legacy Issue tracker which had Summary field more than 255 ,So some data is missing in summary fied of JIRA

Can it made to some defined characters like (350 characters) ?

Please let me know if it can be done with minimal efforts?

Regards

Kapil