How to Manage Comment Visibility when Receiving Comments in Zendesk

    This page describes how to keep internal comments internal and restrict synced comments' visibility.

    Exalate allows handing comments visibility based on a user group or role restriction.

    • Outgoing sync - send comments
      • Jira Software
      • Jira Service management
    • Incoming sync - handle received comments
      • Jira Software
      • Jira Service management
      • Zenmanagement

    Outgoing sync - send comments

    Jira Software

    Jira Software allows limiting comments to users with certain project roles/groups. By default, JIRA is configured to allow restricting comment visibility to project roles only.

    You can restrict comment visibility to a certain user group or based on the user role.

    • Send all comments to the destination side
    replica.comments       = issue.comments
    • Don't send comments which have the user group/role security set
      You can use filterLocal comment helper to filter out comments that you want to synchronize.
    // ensure that only public comments are sent over to the remote instance
    replica.comments = commentHelper.filterLocal(issue.comments)
    • Send all comments except the ones created by a user with the group level dev
    replica.comments = issue.comments.findAll { it.roleLevel != "dev" }

    Jira Service management

    In Jira Service management you can create comments as internal or public.

    • Send all comments to the destination side
    replica.comments       = issue.comments
    • Send only public comments to the destination side
    replica.comments = issue.comments.findAll { !it.internal }

    Incoming sync - handle received comments

    Jira Software

    Jira Software allows limiting comments to users with certain project roles/groups.

    You can add the incoming comment with a certain group/role level and change the existing comment's group/role level.

    • Create local comment based on the remote comment visibility
    issue.comments = commentHelper.mergeComments(issue, replica, {
          comment ->
          if (comment.internal) {
              // if the remote comment is internal make it visible to only users with role "team"
              comment.roleLevel = "team"
          } else {
          // remove all restrictions
              comment.roleLevel = null
              comment.groupLevel = null
          }
          comment
    }
    )

    Jira Service management

    You can handle incoming comments in different ways:

    • Add all comments received from the remote side as internal comments

      This approach also works for Zenmanagement comments.

    issue.comments       = commentHelper.mergeComments(issue, replica, {it.internal = true; it})
    • Add comments received from the remote side as internal comments based on a specific group role
     issue.comments = commentHelper.mergeComments(issue, replica, {
      // make the comment internal, if the comment is visible only to the user role "team" 
      comment ->
        comment.internal = comment.roleLevel == "team"
      // collect the comments 
      comment
    }
    )

    Zendesk

    • Add all incoming comments as Internal notes to the Zendesk tickets
     issue.comments = commentHelper.mergeComments(issue, replica, {
      comment ->
        comment.internal = true
        comment
      }
    )