Most of the customers that are migrating from external systems into JSM use private comments, we need to have this feature to accommodate these migrations. This should be built-in in the JSM product!

I consider this a bug.

At present this lack of option is well on the way to prevent us from migrating to Jira Service Desk. I can format to other data types – does anyone have a way to import a comment with body, author, create date, and visibility set?

While we also used the db workaround, the problem remains that there's still a period after the CSV import when private comments are visible. Because transition of a big servicedesk from an external system typically cannot occur overnight (ours contains millions of rows, and the old system must remain up until the changeover, requiring incremental imports), there remains a chance customers will be able to access damaging comments before those comments can be made internal again.

Mitigating this risk - without incurring expensive, tedious workarounds - would also help us represent servicedesk in a positive manner to our stakeholders during what should be the final stages of our evaluation.

This is a more serious issue as inability to retain customer request visibility may lead to exposure of potentially sensitive information. Here is a couple of real-life use cases:

1. Exporting JSD data with subsequent import into another JSD (with a drastically different configuration, so project configurator can't be used) exposes internal comments to customers, which is unacceptable.
2. Importing non-JSD data from another system (e.g. Salesforce) does not provide an option to set the flag either.

Basically, this is a serious enough issue to make CSV import into JSD a non-starter for many teams.

I did find a workaround that seems to do the trick, but it's more of a hack anyway:
 
 

• Identify comment IDs for all the comments that need to be set to Internal. I did this by cross-referencing Issue Key/Timestamp/Author of the comments in jiraaction and Source data.
• Look up SEQ_ID for 'EntityProperty' in SEQUENCE_VALUE_ITEM
• Construct a set of queries to add comment visibility setting for each comment ID:

  insert into entity_property values (408012,'sd.comment.property',1010336,'sd.public.comment','2016-08-10 14:17:58','2016-08-10 14:17:58','{"internal":true}');

  (first parameter needs to be higher than SEQ_ID in the previous step, with an increment for each line; third parameter is the comment ID from jiraaction, then there are created/updated dates)

• Run the insert queries
• Update SEQ_ID for 'EntityProperty' in SEQUENCE_VALUE_ITEM to exceed the Max of ID inserted into entity_property.
   
  Naturally, this approach is still fairly tedious as it requires quite a bit of data manipulation in Excel as well as an 'insert' DB hack, which is less than ideal, but it surely beats a manual fix for thousands of internal comments.