How does an External Import in Jira Insight determine 'identical objects'?

Question

I'm working on building an application for importing personnel data into Jira Insight. The first thing I built was an import of 'Department' objects from our internal HR application.

Everything is working, but I'm confused as to how it's determining when an object is 'Identical'. Below is a screenshot of the results of my most recent import. This should be 100% duplicates/identical objects as I ran it twice in a row to make sure.

As far as I can tell in the front-end, it's not forcing any unique attributes (I was able to create 2 departments named Marketing, for example) but when I make minor tweaks to other attributes in the data, it is clearly using the 'Name' attribute - which is my insight label - to match on and then update remaining attributes.

Any help or links to additional documentation would be helpful. While the insight docs here were very helpful in getting this working, they don't have a lot of details about how this works.

Nathan Allen · Answer

I'm circling back to this because this problem has resurfaced with employee objects not updating all of the time

I've trimmed my dataset down to a single object that I know has a changes to 2 attributes, manager_name and manager_email.

However, when I submit them to Assets, it tells me that both objects are identical.

Nathan Allen · Answer

I think my question was a little bit of both. I talked through it with a colleague late yesterday and did sort out the externalIdPart, so that's incredibly helpful as it immediately obvious to me what key Insight was matching on before that.

However, I'm still not sure why, in my results, I wouldn't see 45/45 identical objects after I run the import with the exact same data twice in a row.

My script pulls the data from our HR database and then uploads it to Insight and it only has 3 attributes (name, id, is_active) and for this particular dataset I know those aren't changing between imports so I'd expect it to be 45/45 instead of 22/45.

rupper · Answer

Hi @Nathan Allen,

So there's 2 things here, and I'm not 100% certain of which one your question is about:

- How Insight identifies an object (and so during import, decides whether to update or create a new object)

- How Insight decides whether two objects are identical during import.

For the first question: Your import mapping defines what an object identifier is for you. Specifically, the fields you mark with a boolean attribute, "externalIdPart". There's an example of using this attribute here https://developer.atlassian.com/cloud/insight/imports/schema-and-mapping/

Note by default the label of the object is the externalId - unless you define yours.

On the other hand, about the second question: two objects are identical if they share all the same values for their attributes, i.e. value equality.

Hope this helps