Importing hierarchical issues in Jira from CSV file

[Adrian Bica]

I want to import a number of issues in Jira project from a CSV file, where each epic has a number of stories as children. I understand that I have to use issue ID's for that. But my company's Jira has already a number of issues ID's assigned, somewhere over 15000. My question is if in my CSV file should I start the ID's with 1, 2, 3..., assign the correct parents ID's, then the importer will take care of relocating ID's to first available position or how else can I do that?

Thank you

[Trudy Claspill · Accepted solution]

Hello @Adrian Bica 

Welcome to the Atlassian community.

My first question is are you trying to import this information into a Company Managed project or a Team Managed project.

Currently it is not possible to establish the link between an Epic and its child issues when importing them into a Team Managed project.

[Adrian Bica]

Thanks for the answer! It is a Company Managed project

[Trudy Claspill]

Your CSV must have a minimum set of information like this, where Epics appear in the list before any of their child issues.

ID,type,summary,parent
1,Epic,epic summary,
2,Story,story summary,1

The ID column is just a number that is unique. For a story, place the number from the ID column of its parent Epic into the parent column. The Epic in the first row, with ID=1, will be the parent of the Story in the second row. So, in the second row I add "1" to the parent column.

Then when you are mapping your fields, map them as follows. Notice at the bottom of the page is a note that tells you about this mapping.

[Adrian Bica]

Thanks for the info. This was pretty clear from documentation. My question is how to select the ID to be unique across the organization, since there are many other projects, and about 15000 IDs already taken?

This project will be new project, but I don't know what ID is available.

[Trudy Claspill]

The ID in the CSV file does not need to be unique across the organization. It just needs to be unique within the CSV file.

This is not a value that is actually going to be used in the issue data. It is used only by the import process to figure out how to relate issues to each other.

I can be as simple as sequential numbering starting with 1.