Trying to import CSV file from Asana but having issues

[Todd Hall]

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

I think you might have three problems here, although two of them may be obscuring the third.  Fix the third one and re-try before worrying about the first two

• The easy one is date formats - you've got one or more fields in the CSV that you are trying to import into date fields.  Jira can only read date formats in one way during an import, so your CSV date data must be in the same format for every date and date/time field being imported.  You can use whatever format you want, (22 June 2021, 22/6/21, whatever) but you can't have one column with one format and another one in a different shape.
• The second one is more simple - the usernames being read from the file are invalid - they can't contain special characters such as ">".  Do your user names really contain them?  If they do, you're going to have to do some remapping from the broken Asana user ids over to valid Jira ones.

However, both of those may be a direct result of the third, which is making Jira read data from the wrong place (field in the CSV).

The CSV file you've given it is not proper CSV.  It's text, and while it probably looks a lot like CSV, it is not, because it is incorrectly formatted.

The important bit here is separators.  Simple CSV uses, as the name implies, a comma as the separator between fields/columns.  Lines of CSV such as

• 1372, appointment , 24 Jun 2021 15:30, Time for afternoon tea I think

will work fine, that's four columns - a word, number or id, in the first column, an empty space, a date/time and a block of text.

But, you can easily break that.  If you use commas in your numbers, dates or text, anything reading it as CSV is going to see a lot more columns.  For example

• 1,372, appointment , 24 Jun 2021,15:30, Time for afternoon tea, I think

is now seven columns.  In my example, Jira would now be trying to import "appointment" as a date, and it wouldn't know what to do with the last three columns because I've only told it to import 4 columns.

The standard way to handle data that contains separators is escaping them.

• "1,372","appointment","24 Jun 2021,15:30","Time for afternoon tea, I think"

That's now 4 columns again.  Strictly speaking, there's no need to put the " around appointment as it's not a problem column there (but other lines might)

So, your first step to fixing this is probably to try one of two things:

• You could try modifying the CSV such that it escapes any field that might have a comma in it.
• You might, instead, try swapping to a different separator - it's very rare that people use ~, ¬ or | type symbols in their text fields, so exporting CSV using one of those instead of a comma might be easier

Once you've escaped or swapped separators in a new file, there's a good chance the other two problems will vanish!