Exporting and Importing for later usage

Question

Good day to all.

We are a manufacturing company with many large components and machines that we build. Using Jira as the communication and workflow manager for many stages of our design and production process.

Currently, we are in need of the functionality to export a Jira Task type issue (Including all sub-tasks, attachments, and custom fields). After the export process, we need to save that data/exported file(s) into our product data management system. When we want to build the same type of machine again, we need to import the exported file to be used once more.

The use of .json files is looking like an option but has not yielded any fruit so far.

Any help would be appreciated.

Best of regards

Heinrich

Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Answer

You'll probably come back to https://docs.atlassian.com/software/jira/docs/api/REST/1000.824.0/ quite quickly while you're investigating this, it has all the core calls you'll need and some examples with them.

There are some useful getting-started links in the first couple of sections of this guide though, which is why I go to it first rather than reel off three or four!

Heinrich Graupner · Answer

@Nic Brough -Adaptavist-   do you have any advice or starting point if we have not used REST API in the past?

Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Answer

There is no single object export for Jira, not to a format that can be re-imported later.  And the on-screen exports (Word, XML) don't include subtasks.

You'll need to write something that can grab an issue and it's subtasks, save it in some format (JSON is what I'd reach for too, as that's what the REST API works with mostly), and then write something that can poke a new set of issues back in over REST based on the data in the saved export.