How to Customize the Preview Rendering of a jira:customFieldType Field in Issue View?

Forge Forge UI Kit and Custom UI
1

Hi everyone

We’re building a Forge app with a custom field using the jira:customFieldType module, and we’re using Custom UI for the rendering.

Our goal is to display the field value as a table directly in the issue view sidebar, but we’ve hit a roadblock. According to the Forge docs:

  • formatter.expression only supports plain strings via Jira expressions

  • And it seems like HTML, tables, images, and other custom markup aren’t allowed

But here’s the thing — we’ve come across a few Marketplace apps that appear to go beyond this limitation and display tables, progress bars, even images inside custom fields:

We’d love to understand:

  1. Is it possible to render rich layouts like tables or visuals directly in the issue view using Custom UI?

  2. If yes — are there any examples, tips, or workarounds available?

  3. Or is this only achievable using UI Kit, or maybe even something outside of Forge altogether?

If anyone from the Atla

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ssian team or the community has insight into how these apps achieved this — or if we’re just missing something in the docs — we’d really appreciate the help!

Thanks in advance