Can I show a trend of data
Asked by Gwendylene Enow-Tanyi:

Each week users key in specific information for a specific field, say 'Status notes as of Date'. So for instance

Week 1 - Data would be XYZ

Week 2 - Data might be XXX

Week 3 - Data might be YYY

I want to be able to show a two dimensional table where the rows reflect each item/ticket and the columns show the status and the "Status notes as of date' for each week.. So the table would have

Issue ID Status Week 1(10/17) Week 2 (10/24) Week 3 (10/31)

JiRA-101 In Progress XYX XXX YYY


Answers:
author: Trudy Claspill
body: Hello [@Gwendylene Enow-Tanyi](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/5149386)

Welcome to the Atlassian community.

Are the notes for all those separate weeks being made into the same field? Or is there a separate custom field for each week's notes? What is the field type(s) being used for the data?

If the notes are being compiled into a single custom field, then there is not a native Jira capability in the UI to get what you want.

You *might* be able to construct an Automation Rule that would parse the data in that one field and split it up into separate information that you could then print into an email. However if the field is a multi-line text field in which anything can be entered, it would be very challenging to parse with no reliable and standardized format for the input.

comments: author: Gwendylene Enow-Tanyi
body: I am not truly sure how to design it out. My first approach is to create two fields. one to capture the notes and the second to then stamp an entry each time a note is made with a date.

Then parse out the date and use that to create the two-dimensional view with the notes for each corresponding period .. what do you think or am i being too optimistic?


author: Trudy Claspill
body: Let us back up a moment and ask "what problem are you trying to solve"?

It is not uncommon to want to record regular updates on a Jira issue. That is usually done by entering a new Comment.

What problem are you trying to solve by generating a report of these periodic updates?

What type of data is being recorded in these updates? Maybe there is a better way to track the "progress" noted in these updates, rather than making a text note.

When considering the problem you are trying to solve, also consider these other factors that could impact your reporting:

Are all the issues going to be updated every week?

Or will only some issues be getting updated each week, such that some issues would have not updates for some of the weeks?

For what range of weeks do you want to provide the data? For instance do you want all the updates starting with the very first update through now? Or only the updates for the past X number of weeks?


author: Gwendylene Enow-Tanyi
body: The problem i am trying to solve is the ability to have Project Managers key in details weekly and have those rendered in a format that shows the weekly progress. Even if they are to key in % complete.. we would want to do that weekly to show the overall progression of the epic factoring other criteria NOT tracked in JIRA.

Yes the exact same issues/epics will be updated every week. though some might not.

I want for to report for all weeks and then perhaps sum up monthly (for those that are percentages) but i would need for all weeks in a year consecutively. i want all updates including from previous weeks.. obviously there will be no updates for the future weeks. But could there be options to provide updates for the past X weeks or provide updates for all past weeks?

Thank you for your responses.


author: Trudy Claspill
body: Hello [@Gwendylene Enow-Tanyi](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/5149386)

Based on my experience Jira does not have native functionality that will provide you with a solution that meets your needs without very complex work.

It *might* be possible to use an Automation Rule to parse a single text field per Epic and pull from it the data that you want, but I think that parsing code would be very complex. It is beyond my skills to come up with that code.

Even if you could successfully parse the data, creating a single output report that encompasses the data for all the Epics would again be very complex. And an Automation Rule can only generate that output as an email, a message to a system like Slack, or feeding the data to some external process through a web request to have the external process produce the output.

If you opted to simply update a numeric "Percent complete" field each week, you would need a solution that retrieves all the update history for that field, and can parse through that to sort out the updates for each week. Jira has a REST API that would allow you to [retrieve issue history](https://developer.atlassian.com/cloud/jira/platform/rest/v3/api-group-issues/#api-rest-api-3-issue-issueidorkey-changelog-get) but it gets the entire issue history. It doesn't support getting the change history for a specified individual field.

If you wanted to get more feedback on using an Automation Rule as the solution, you may want to post a new question in the Automation Questions forum to get more focused feedback. You don't have to reproduce this original post there - just provide a link to this post as a reference.  
<https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Automation-questions/qa-p/automation-questions>

You may also want to consider third party apps or other Atlassian product (maybe Jira Align?) to see if they could provide a more intuitive solution to enable you to track progress in a non-standard way and provide reports on it. I don't have any specific recommendations for third party apps, as this is not a use case that I have needed to solve for myself. You could search the [Atlassian Marketplace](https://marketplace.atlassian.com) for apps that provide custom reporting solutions to see if any might support your scenario.


author: Gwendylene Enow Tanyi
body: Thank you for this. It really helps me think it through. It is quite complex and not perhaps worth the effort. I may look into a plugin that does pivot tables too.

Thank you immensely


Tags: cloud

jira-cloud