Is there a way to bulk import dependencies on non-existing issues through csv

[Agron Morina]

Hello all,

For more efficient work, I am doing a bulk upload of the issues to Jira via csv files. Is it possible to define the dependencies of the issues in advance in the csv, so that the issues are already uploaded with their dependencies?

Thank you guys for the answers in advance.

[Hannes Obweger - JXL for Jira]

Hi @Agron Morina

welcome to the community!

If you're open to solutions from the Atlassian Marketplace, I believe you might save yourself quite a lot of time with the app that my team is working on, JXL for Jira.

JXL is a full-fledged spreadsheet/table view that allows viewing, inline-editing, sorting, and filtering by all your issue fields, much like you’d do in e.g. Excel or Google Sheets. This includes, of course, linked issues, and several other issue-linking-related data. It also supports bulk-editing via copy/paste, like so:

You can copy/paste between JXL and pretty much any other app or data (including CSV files), and update any number of issues in one action. You just need to make sure you're pasting into the correct issues (but that should be easy using JXL's sorting and filtering capabilities), and that you paste in a format that JXL "understands" (see the clip above). For that, you may need a little bit of pre-processing, but that should be easy to do.

(It's also worth noting that JXL can do much more than that: From support for configurable issue hierarchies and groupings, to sum-ups, and conditional formatting.)

Any questions just let me know,

Best,

Hannes

[Walter Buggenhout]

Hi @Agron Morina and welcome to the Community!

The short and simple answer is no. A dependency in Jira is implemented through a link between 2 issues. In order to create that link, both issues must exist, otherwise there is nothing to link to.

Hope this clarifies!

[Agron Morina]

I see. But it would work if I upload the issues first and add the links afterwards via CSV bulk upload, do I see that right?

[Walter Buggenhout]

I have not done any imports like that, so can't speak from experience. This KB article describes how to import issue links from csv. It is not clear from the article if it applies to Jira cloud, however.

If you prepare your csv file as described in the article, you should be able to confirm if it works once you get to the map fields screen. If you can select the proper link types there, you should be fine. If not, the feature is probably not supported in cloud.