JIRA creates new users when importing issues from CSV

Saneth Kumar February 6, 2012

I'm trying to import issues from a CSV for a particular project. It works fine except when it comes to the assignee field.

When I fill in the Assignee field with a username, it gets assigned to the correct user. However, when i fill in the Full Name of an already Existing User, it creates a new user.

Is there a work-around for this? or will i just have to fill in the usernames of the assignees?

Also, how do I switch off the automatic user creation on JIRA 4.4.4. I went through the documentation but can't seem to find the appropriate page to uncheck the option.

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Wojciech Seliga
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February 6, 2012

JIRA Importers Plugin bundled with JIRA 4.4.x does not allow anymore to skip creation of the users. We decided to remove this option as the import would have failed for these rows from CVS which indicate missing usernames. That in our opinion did not make sense and we wanted to simplify the import wizard.

Importer expects a username in CSV file, not Display Name. There is no easy work-around for it at them moment. You could either pre-process your CSV file by replacing all "Display Name" cells with corresponding users, or you could hack JIRA Importer Plugin on your own - its source it available for all JIRA commercial license holders.

Jasmine Bulin August 18, 2016

A better solution for those of us that use import regularly would be if mapping the assignee field would support you to map to known users with some validation.

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3 votes
Andy Brook [Plugin People]
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February 6, 2012

Not sure, I guess its doing some kind of identity matching?

To disable user creations see: http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRA/Importing+Data+From+CSV :

Usernames — If you don't specify mapping, the importer will automatically map imported usernames to JIRA usernames (lowercase).
(info) Regardless of whether you specify mapping, JIRA will automatically create usernames for missing users unless you un-check the 'Create new users' option on the final 'Import Data' screen (see Screenshot 4 below).

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