Is it possible to retrieve issue history from Jira via SOAP or some other external API

[Andrew Reid]

What I want to do is: write a program that retrieves the history of which versions issues have been assigned to over time. If issue n was "fix for" version 1.0 on 2011-05-21 and was moved to 'fix for' version 1.1 on 2011-06-01 then I want to know that for all issues in an automated way.

I had a look at the SOAP API but it doesn't seem to have a method for this information. I'd prefer not to have to write a plugin or talk to the underlying DB directly for this information.

Is there a way of doing this?

[Jeremy Largman · Accepted solution]

The parent feature request for change history is JRA-5536, which started to be implemented in JQL in JIRA 4.3. It's got a related issue for accessing this through an API at JRA-9050, so for now, this is an open feature request.

I know in the question you mentioned not wanting to talk to the db or write a plugin, but for posterity I'll post the links for those as well. You can access this through the database (there's a page describing it here). There's also a tip in the forums on how to access it programatically (through a plugin).

[Andrew Reid]

Thanks. Look like direct DB access is the way to go (I was only hoping to avoid it so I wouldn't have to have tiresome conversations with DBA's about whether I was going to kill the database :) )

[Chad Larkin]

You might be able to do this with Groovy scripting. At Toolbox.com we are actually using a groovy script to scan through issue history and grab the date that an issue was assigned and then populating a custom field with that information from the issue history. You can read about what we did here.