Importing Comments for Jira Incidents

[Andrew Vernum]

I'm testing out Jira Service Desk and have made a lot of progress in importing my old data. I've even successfully imported all of my old work log entries as comments on the issues. One thing I'd like to be able to do is ensure I am able to preserve the names of the users that made the entries. Currently, unless the same user name exists in Jira, the comment is tagged with the name of the logged in administrator making the import (myself).

My question is, can I automatically generate users based on the username associated with the comment import, if that user does not exist? I've noticed that it can do this when I assign the Reporter from the import.

Secondly, if I cannot do this, the user pool is relatively small and I could manually generate the user names, but I'm concerned about license usage at that point. For the comments to be associated with the users, do all of the users need to be licensed at the time of import (and at what level)? This is mostly for historical data, as many usernames associated with these comments are no longer current users.

Thanks!

[Andrew Vernum · Accepted solution]

To close the loop for anybody else that may have encountered a similar circumstance, I went in and manually added user accounts for all of my technicians (past and present), I just did not add them to a particular application (so no license used). The import worked as expected, and all of the comments were properly attributed, I just found that a NO ACCESS TO REQUEST tag was added to comments with older users that remained unlicensed.

To answer the first part of my question, it does not look like any sort of automated action was possible to add the users as the import tool parsed the comments.

Finally, to make clear on where this import was occuring, it was through the administrator portal section to import from an external source using CSV, not the import issues feature.

(Yes I accepted my own answer...)

[Dave Theodore [Coyote Creek Consulting]]

Check this doc on how to format comments. It explains the format that the comment body needs to be in so that it retains the user and date/time information.

[Andrew Vernum]

Thanks, but I'm not having issues with the parsing (FYI the document is either outdated or not applicable to Jira Service Desk, the format used for comments there is date; username; comment text). Everything is properly preserved on the import, including the date and time. The issue is that the users do not currently exist in Jira. I'm looking for a way to add the users as I import the comments, like you can with the reporter field.