Bob Swift CLI: Adding Group Space Permission For Group That Doesn't Exist Yet

[Brandon Viertel]

We are going through an AD reorg in the near future where we are renaming all of our AD groups with a universal prefix. As Confluence uses the name and not the GUID, this rename will not be automatically picked up and a slew of new groups will be created. Atlassian recommends (but does not support) renaming through the database, however I would prefer not to do database manipulation directly.

That being said, we came across a method using Bob Swift CLI where we export the space group permission list, add a column with the new group name, then import the updated space permission file list. This method would work best as it a) does not modify the existing groups in the space permissions, b) retains the old permissions is something were to go wrong and c) this can be done ahead of time. This works up until the very last part of the process, where the process throws the following error: 

Remote error: No user or group with the name '<groupName>' exists.

The group names have not been updated yet, so it fails on not finding the group name. Through database manipulation, you can change the group name/add a new group and it will appear as "Group not found" if it doesn't exist.

TL;DR: Is there a way through Bob Swift CLI to force the addition of a group that doesn't exist yet to the space permissions?