How to search by a single character in a comment, and improve comment capture?

[Matthew Lewis]

I have two related questions.

1. We need better feedback from users so my team set up a mandatory comment field in a modal on transition to workflow status nodes. They avoid this by putting "." and moving on. Yes.....a period. That's it. Question: does anyone know how I can use a JQL search to find issues with comments with "." (so I can batch them up and ask for more info)?

2. It seems nitpicky but lots of people actually need the info regarding the issue and changes. Hence the mandatory comment. The period means we have to go on a wild goose chase and bug these users anyway. Has anyone found a simple, low-disruption way of doing this cleverly with project configurations or screens?

• I came across https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-questions/Search-for-issues-with-comments-by-user-and-text/qaq-p/716141 but that didn't help me (and is really old.)
• I would include a screenshot, but white space with a dot in it is the most underwhelming and non-useful thing I've seen in...a while.

[Petter Gonçalves · Accepted solution]

Hello @Matthew Lewis

Thank you for reaching out.

I understand that you are looking for a way to search for exact text and also include more validators (as minimum character limit) to avoid users to bypass the field validation with aleatory characters. Is that correct?

Unfortunately, there is no way to use the equal (=) operator for text fields and add more field validations, however, we understand how these functionalities would be useful, so we created the following feature request to consider its implementation:

Add the ability to configure field length validators 

Better exact-text searching 

Feel free to vote and watch the suggestion to increase its priority and also receive notifications about any updates.

As a workaround, you can use the "ORDER BY" parameter in a text field to properly display a list with all the issues containing only a single character in the text field. These would be the steps:

1. Use a separated Text field to add your required comments to your issues (I suppose you're already doing this)
2. Navigate to your issue navigator page > Select "List View" > Under the columns menu, select the text field created to be displayed in the issue navigator
3. Add the following query:

   ORDER BY "yourtextfield"

4. The issues which fields are added with the "." will be displayed grouped at the top of the page:
   

Also, a way to reinforce the need to fill your text field with a true value would be to add a warning message to your field, as: "Add this field with your request steps".

Let us know if you have any questions.

[Matthew Lewis]

Thank you, Petter! I appreciate that, particularly the exact-text searching request. I'll try the workaround you are suggesting too.