nok would it be fine to only display it on the run screen? That would be the screen that looks like the one below

jamesdumay yes that will help!

I thinking about to add a column in the activity tab on the job overview screen. But the problem should be that there is already a lot of informations and in addition there is not enough space to display more informations. I understand that is to much on one screen.
But on the other hand the commit informations like id, author and message are displayed on the job overview screen and in the run screen under the register "changes". That is a duplication. Therefore maybe the column "message" on the job overview screen could be replaced with a description column and the commit message will be displayed as a tooltip when we hover with the mouse over the commit id. Is that an idea ?

If this not acceptable, i am happy with the description in the run screen

nok yes, we could use the message column - we are planning to override it when there are no commits to display the trigger reason/build cause. I like that a lot

jamesdumay oka i see that on you live server (https://ci.blueocean.io/blue/organizations/jenkins/blueocean/activity) and i understand that. So in job run will be okay ...

ah as i gorgot please support as html <a href='www/${variable}/fixedstuff'>[binaries]</a>" or in markdown syntax. Important is that we can set alternative display text and groovy variables are resolved and placed into the link

OK I think we can do that.

jamesdumay We are using using a single job to pipeline our infrastructure/code deploys across all of our applications, so we will be looking at the activity page much more often than the run screen. If that information is only accessible on the run screen, we would need to maintain another mapping somewhere else to tie a particular application/environment to a run #.

jakauppila thats great context - thank you Would you be disadvantaged if you lost the commit information in the Message column and got your currentBuild.description instead?

jamesdumay Nope, that would be perfectly fine. Once we're up and running at scale I don't expect many commits to be coming in, so if we have to click into the run screen to view that information under "changes" is acceptable.

Will the user be able to define what appears in the Message column? In an above comment, you mention displaying the 'trigger reason/build cause' if there are no commits, but in our case, we would always want to display currentBuild.description regardless.

jakauppila I don't intend on creating any UI for the user to set the message at this time.

Heres a preview

Code changed in jenkins
User: James Dumay
Path:
src/test/js/multibranch/commitMessages.js
http://jenkins-ci.org/commit/blueocean-acceptance-test/391c3ddccd6f79a673472815bd2382f8ac404d03
Log:
JENKINS-41769 update xpath for branch commit message

Code changed in jenkins
User: James William Dumay
Path:
src/test/js/multibranch/commitMessages.js
http://jenkins-ci.org/commit/blueocean-acceptance-test/c38dbbab50a4ede852a1f07278aeeada7196ceee
Log:
JENKINS-41769 update xpath for branch commit message (#140)

Will be released in Blue Ocean 1.1

jamesdumay is there a nightly build available somewhere that I could test this out?

jakauppila you can activate the experimental update center to install the beta releases of Blue Ocean. This change isn't in a released beta but I will follow up today and have someone release.

jamesdumay Looks good! The only thing I would say is that now that the "Run" content updates from currentBuild.displayName, it's a bit limited as it only displays ~7 characters.

How do I use a Linebreak in the description? I have the Safe HTML Formatter, but neither "\n" not "<br>" trigger a line break.

With Safe HTML Formatter I can add links to currentBuild.description and links will be rendered correctly everywhere except Blue Ocean plugin:

vs

Are there any plans to support HTML tags in Blue Ocean build description?

vgaidarji I opened JENKINS-45181 because I expected the description to support <br> (Safe HTML).

Quoting jamesdumay 

 the design we have only caters for a single line on both the messages column and the pipeline result details header. Allowing arbitrary amounts of formatting and information there would significantly impact the design. Ill be honest, we are unlikely to change that in the next year. However sometime next year we are planning a redesign of those screens so we could consider it then.

I would like to see HTML being supported in the description aswell.

Is there a way to turn this feature off?

Yes by not setting the description for your pipeline

My pipelines were already using description property before this fix, generating a fancy html table with loads of useful links and such. It works well outside of blue ocean where now I'm getting half of page of html gibberish. 

quas I understand. Could you open a new ticket with your use case and we can evaluate it from there?

Created https://issues.jenkins-ci.org/browse/JENKINS-45719