I'm importing issues from CSV and would like to retain Issue Key of my old issues but I get error

Question

What am I doing wrong? I only mapped Summary and Issue Key and this error shows up.

Fabio Racobaldo _Catworkx_ · Accepted Answer

Hi @Meg C and welcome,

issue key is an internal field managed by jira that is based on an incremental number filed at project level. You can't force your own issue key.

Hope this clarifies,

Fabio

Ste Wright · Accepted Answer

Hi @Meg C

Issue Keys are not possible to import unfortunately - you can't guarantee the same issue key (or key number) is set during a CSV upload.

You could load them into another field though to refer to in future - such as a single line text field, or labels.

Ste

Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted Answer

You can't retain issue keys unless they

* match the issue key rule for the projects you are importing into
* are ordered in your import file such that as Jira reads them, it will create them in the right order

It doesn't really retain the keys, at all.  Jira will simply create the issues in the order it reads them and hence matches the old issue key.  If you have issue keys that don't match the project scheme, they're useless to Jira, but you can import them into a custom field if you want to retain the historical records.