Problem to solve

There are multiple issues around customizing or changing the comments that the GitLab Jira integration produces:

1. #21919
2. #17071
3. #29864
4. #35544

All four of these issues may be able to be solved with a single, more elegant solution. Some propose customization and some propose changes, which leads me to believe there's definitely a problem here, and the right solution has yet to be found.

the comment section into our JIRA look a bit cluttered and we wanted to simplify it

Would be beneficial to include branch name so it can be easily figured out what branch it's applied to

users can change it for their specific needs. For example by including whole commit message and not just a commit title.

we hope to be able to include "repo name" and "target branch" in the Merge Request Link Message

Here's an example from @arturoherrero that shows the current state of this comment:

Intended users

Gitlab/Jira users who are seeing these comments in the Jira application.

Further details

Proposal

After reading through all 4 of the related issues, it sounds like the root of the problems stem from either the lack of information or too much information being presented in the JIRA comments.

It looks like we already addressed the issue of showing too much information by making the comments optional in this MR.

I think that the most effective solution here would be to simply:

1. Update the default comment template to include the branch name as mentioned in Issue 17071
2. Include an option that shows all information in the comment. (e.g. SHA, IDs, entire commit message)

My assumption is that by having both options 1 and 2 should satisfy the needs of the majority. Moving forward, we would like to validate the need for allowing a fully customizable comment template message. But that will take more time. So in order to make progress, I think allowing options 1 and 2 for now are a good start.

Proposal for JIRA Setting update:

Updated mockup in progress...

Proposal for the various comment messages:

Permissions and Security

Documentation

We will need to upgrade our Jira integration documentation with updated screenshots here: https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/integrations/jira.html

Links / references

/cc @lvanc