Html link formatting is broken.

[Peter Bentley]

I am writing a comment in a JIRA ticket at my company and I need to do something simple: add a long link to a short string of text. But the formatting only works sometimes. Here's more specifics (repro steps):

• Write some text, like "Here's a link to my mockups."
• Select the "link" portion and then click the hyperlink icon in the top row
• This gives me a place to put in my link inline with the comment I'm editing (a popover might make more sense, but oh well)
• Select the example link text
• Paste in my longer link
• Observe the results: I get no trustworthy preview of what this will look like when I publish. Click back and forth between Visual and Text but that doesn't change anything; I still see "[link|https://www.figma.com/proto/lghthEQM8QjSAFVVWiYI5r/Appname?page-id=2745%3A239688&node-id=2761%3A243581&viewport=393%2C52%2C0.17&scaling=contain]" instead of just "link" (with the link clickable in the text)

Problems:

1. This is generally just a really bad experience overall. Slack lets you select text and then paste the link and it automatically formats the text with the link (in case an engineer or product manager or designer from JIRA sees this thread and wants an example of a place where this interaction is done well)
2. When I paste in the link, since I think I'm using the "Rich Text" or "Visual" editor, I should see the link reformat before I publish my comment. Right now I can't find a way to get it to preview properly; maybe it will render the way I expect it to when I publish; maybe it won't? Maybe if I wait 10 minutes it will preview? Sometimes that actually works (!). I would like a preview so I can know whether it will format correctly for the VIP that I'm responding to.
3. Sometimes the link formatting just doesn't work and I don't know why. Some of the links get formatted properly (which I can see after I publish) and some don't, and I don't know what the difference is between the two.

Apologies if this is not the right place to put this, but I definitely do appreciate any tips folks have or workarounds.

[Peter Bentley · Accepted solution]

Atlassian sent me an email this morning saying "We couldn't help but notice you got an answer to your question…Two cheers for our community members!" Not sure why it isn't three cheers. But either way, three things are true: (1) I appreciate Mike's replies above but I saw them several months ago (in the unlikely chance someone who can fix that problem sees this), (2) there is no new activity that I can see on this thread, so I'm not sure why I got an email saying there was, and (3) I was surprised to find a few weeks ago that the feature I requested did actually quietly appear to start working. So three cheers for that. And Mike if you see this thanks for your thoughtful responses.

[Mike Rathwell]

Hi @Peter Bentley 

You didn't cite whether you are using Jira Server/Data Center or Cloud. IF it is Cloud, there are some extensions to smart linking either in or coming soon that should help that quite a lot. If you are on Server/Data Center it won't so much. 

Since this appears to be Figma in question, this search shows Figma apps that can be added to Jira to do what you are looking for. Note that, if you are on Server/Data Center the choices are more limited. If you are on Cloud there are several that are free including one from Figma.

[Peter Bentley]

Hi @Mike Rathwell thanks for your response. 

The URL for our Jira tickets is https://jira.int.our-company-name.tech/some-ticket. Does that mean I'm using Server/Data Center?

With the options available to me (thanks for the link!) it seems like most of these create a text field that I can paste a Figma link into. That could be nice, but the link I want to paste in is not always a Figma file; sometimes it's a google doc, or a google drive link, or a reference to a webpage out on the internet. I also need to be able to refer precisely to it within the body of my comment so that there's no risk of the people I'm corresponding with missing what it is I'm referring to. There are a lot of tickets my engineers deal with, most of which don't have Figma links, so I'd prefer to not require them to look in an unexpected place for the content I'm trying to point them to.

I am curious to hear if people have workarounds, or if not maybe there's a better way to report a bug or submit a feature request? 

[Mike Rathwell]

Smart linking like that isn't really a Thing in Data Center. Not sure that it WON'T be but you definitely are hosted by that URL.

Before I migrated my last shop to Cloud, the things you want to do could only be done IF there was a specific app for it. When I went Cloudy, it either did it natively or there were more and better apps to do it.

MOSTLY, I found ways to integrate the bigger things. Figma and G-Docs are one of them. Slack, Miro, and other SaaS had ways to do it. The rest of the time the workaround is an API level thing to at least move data in/out if needed.

I wish I had a simpler answer for you. Do spend some time searching for "things" on Atlassian Marketplace. You may be surprised to find a big problem answered with a free app. Might be a paid one but also solves a big problem that makes it worthwhile.