Getting "issues have been skipped because they already exist" when trying to update issues

Question

I'm trying to update the Parent of existing issues via CSV importer in External System Importer.

The importing page states: "To import child-parent relationships, define the column mapping for: Issue Id, Parent and Issue Type", however, if I do this it ignores the issues:

2024-04-17 02:59:13,476 INFO - External issue 10844 already exists as RES-834, not importing.
2024-04-17 02:59:13,497 INFO - External issue 10860 already exists as RES-850, not importing.
2024-04-17 02:59:13,500 WARN - 2 of 2 issues have been skipped because they already exist in destination projects.

It completely ignores the issues without updating the fields that changed and I told it to map.

I've tried different permutations of fields to import/ignore, including trying to do Parent -> Parent Link and Issue Id -> External Issue Id.

This is my CSV:

SummaryIssue TypeIssue keyIssue idParentCleaning up records fails when user is removed from farmBugRES-8501086010844GeneralEpicRES-83410844

Jason_b728u9 · Answer

I get this same error. It would be great to have an answer to this question. It does not seem possible to update the Parents of existing work items through the External System Import. If I am trying to change parents of standard work items to Epics it works fine using the Epic Link field. If I am trying to change parents of Sub-tasks to standard work items using the Parent field it does what is described above.

I think I figured it out. In order to get it to update the parents of existing work items, I added an empty Issue Id field and a populated Issue Type field to my csv file and mapped them to the Issue Id and Work item type Jira fields.

My infput file columns:

Key, Summary, parent, Issue Id, Issue Type

My mapped fields:

Work item key, Summary, parent, Issue Id, Work item type

roberto_sc · Answer

Hi @Ste Wright thanks for your answer.

When I try that I get two errors:

* You have to define which CSV column maps to Issue Id if you want to import parents.
* You have to define which CSV column maps to Issue Type if you want to import parents.

If I do include those fields and use Key instead of ID in the parent, it again ignores the issues, which makes sense.I think what you are describing is what I used last year, but it looks like they changed the importing logic when they made the move from "Epic Link" to "Parent".

Ste Wright · Answer

Hi @roberto_sc

When importing the file back into the system - you should only need to map...

* Summary
* Issue Key - i.e issue you're updating
* Parent

The Parent field should be the issue key of the Parent, as opposed to the ID

Can you clarify that's the mapping you're doing, and try with the Key rather than ID?

Ste