Is it possible to get the issue history using the REST API?

[Angel Montenegro]

Is it possible to get the history of an issue using the JIRA REST API?

Thanks.

[Stefan Kohler · Accepted solution]

Depending on the kind of history you're looking for this is possible.

http://docs.atlassian.com/jira/REST/latest/#id162178

Another great way to discover the JIRA rest api is via the rest api browser, which is included in the developers toolbox or a JIRA development:

- https://developer.atlassian.com/display/RAB/Overview+of+the+Atlassian+REST+API+Browser
- https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/com.atlassian.devrel.developer-toolbox-plugin

Cheers

[bradley.shields@datadoghq.com]

Definitely add ?expand=changelog as Jonny Xu added below, I didn't see column changes without it!

[Chris Young]

Jonny, that is fantastic. It works! Many Thanks.

jira = JIRA(options, basic_auth=(USERNAME, PASSWORD))

issue = jira.issue('FOO-100', expand='changelog')
changelog = issue.changelog

for history in changelog.histories:
    for item in history.items:
        if item.field == 'status':
            print 'Date:' + history.created + ' From:' + item.fromString + ' To:' + item.toString

Gives me:

Date:2012-10-23T09:49:41.197+0100 From:Open To:Queued
Date:2012-10-23T09:49:43.838+0100 From:Queued To:In Progress
Date:2012-10-23T09:49:45.390+0100 From:In Progress To:Blocked
Date:2012-10-29T16:06:36.733+0000 From:Blocked To:In Progress
Date:2012-10-31T16:47:40.191+0000 From:In Progress To:Peer Review
Date:2012-10-31T16:47:41.783+0000 From:Peer Review To:Customer Approval

Which is exactly what I wanted!

Now I can get data on cycle time, figure out where our bottlenecks are and see which tickets are dropping out of our workflow after we have commited to working on them.

Brilliant.

Many Thanks!

[Oleksandr]

Hello Chris, could you tell me how can i get status of field "assignee" from someone to someone? and how can i get comment from jira?

[Chai Teng Ong]

Hi Chris, can I have a sample of code in Excel VBA format?

[Ventsislav]

Here are all possible item types:

item_fields = {
    'Epic Link',
    'Link',
    'Notes for QA',
    'Rank',
    'WorklogId',
    'assignee',
    'description',
    'status',
    'summary',
    'timeestimate',
    'timespent'
}

[Deleted user]

Hi Chris, i think this is what you are looking for

https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRA-27692?focusedCommentId=303842&page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel#comment-303842

https://jira.atlassian.com/rest/api/2/issue/JRA-22053?expand=changelog

In that example, you can see that one of the top-level attributes is "expand", and it includes the expandable name "changelog". If you add<tt>?expand=changelog</tt> then JIRA will include the changelog (issue history) in the response.

[bradley.shields@datadoghq.com]

Doing God's work here, thank you so much for this 

[Minglei Liu]

it works for me, at 2024, so much appreciate

[Matt Doar]

I had to use getattr(item, 'from') instead of item.from due to reserved keywords in Python

[Chris Young]

I would like to get the change history for an issue, i.e. the information shown on an issue's 'History' tab:

I have tried to do this using the Python wrapper to the REST API as follows:

from jira.client import JIRA
import json

options = {
    'server': 'https://yada-yada.atlassian.net',
}

jira = JIRA(options, basic_auth=(USERNAME, PASSWORD))

projects = jira.projects()
issue = jira.issue('INF-119')
print json.dumps(issue.raw)

The result is this:

{
    "key": "INF-119",
    "fields": {
        "comment": {
            "total": 0,
            "startAt": 0,
            "comments": [],
            "maxResults": 0
        },
        "customfield_10700": null,
        "customfield_10703": null,
        "customfield_10702": null,
        "customfield_10705": null,
        "customfield_10704": null,
        "customfield_10600": null,
        "customfield_10601": null,
        "labels": [],
        "aggregatetimespent": null,
        "watches": {
            "self": "https://yada-yada.atlassian.net/rest/api/2/issue/INF-119/watchers",
            "watchCount": 1,
            "isWatching": false
        },
        "assignee": {
            "displayName": "Chris Young",
            "name": "chris.young",
            "self": "https://yada-yada.atlassian.net/rest/api/2/user?username=chris.young",
            "avatarUrls": {
                "48x48": "https://yada-yada.atlassian.net/secure/useravatar?ownerId=chris.young&avatarId=10300",
                "16x16": "https://yada-yada.atlassian.net/secure/useravatar?size=small&ownerId=chris.young&avatarId=10300"
            },
            "emailAddress": "Chris.Young@yada-yada.com",
            "active": true
        },
        "lastViewed": null,
        "issuelinks": [],
        "worklog": {
            "worklogs": [],
            "total": 0,
            "startAt": 0,
            "maxResults": 0
        },
        "customfield_10400": null,
        "aggregateprogress": {
            "progress": 0,
            "total": 0
        },
        "environment": null,
        "votes": {
            "hasVoted": false,
            "self": "https://yada-yada.atlassian.net/rest/api/2/issue/INF-119/votes",
            "votes": 0
        },
        "fixVersions": [],
        "priority": {
            "iconUrl": "https://yada-yada.atlassian.net/images/icons/priority_critical.gif",
            "self": "https://yada-yada.atlassian.net/rest/api/2/priority/2",
            "name": "Critical",
            "id": "2"
        },
        "timespent": null,
        "customfield_10109": null,
        "aggregatetimeestimate": null,
        "progress": {
            "progress": 0,
            "total": 0
        },
        "duedate": null,
        "attachment": [],
        "status": {
            "id": "6",
            "iconUrl": "https://yada-yada.atlassian.net/images/icons/status_closed.gif",
            "self": "https://yada-yada.atlassian.net/rest/api/2/status/6",
            "description": "The issue is considered finished, the resolution is correct. Issues which are closed can be reopened.",
            "name": "Closed"
        },
        "updated": "2012-10-29T13:53:58.317+0000",
        "customfield_10200": [],
        "subtasks": [],
        "description": null,
        "reporter": {
            "displayName": "Chris Young",
            "name": "chris.young",
            "self": "https://yada-yada.atlassian.net/rest/api/2/user?username=chris.young",
            "avatarUrls": {
                "48x48": "https://yada-yada.atlassian.net/secure/useravatar?ownerId=chris.young&avatarId=10300",
                "16x16": "https://yada-yada.atlassian.net/secure/useravatar?size=small&ownerId=chris.young&avatarId=10300"
            },
            "emailAddress": "Chris.Young@yada-yada.com",
            "active": true
        },
        "customfield_10103": null,
        "customfield_10102": null,
        "customfield_10101": null,
        "customfield_10100": "3_*:*_1_*:*_4111_*|*_1_*:*_1_*:*_10925_*|*_6_*:*_1_*:*_0_*|*_10011_*:*_1_*:*_4469_*|*_10013_*:*_1_*:*_2206_*|*_10009_*:*_1_*:*_2121",
        "timeestimate": null,
        "timeoriginalestimate": null,
        "customfield_10000": "3659",
        "aggregatetimeoriginalestimate": null,
        "customfield_10300": "3656",
        "customfield_10701": null,
        "created": "2012-10-29T13:53:34.485+0000",
        "versions": [],
        "resolutiondate": "2012-10-29T13:53:58.306+0000",
        "summary": "Dummy ticket to see if we can extract change history",
        "project": {
            "self": "https://yada-yada.atlassian.net/rest/api/2/project/INF",
            "avatarUrls": {
                "48x48": "https://yada-yada.atlassian.net/secure/projectavatar?pid=10200&avatarId=10010",
                "16x16": "https://yada-yada.atlassian.net/secure/projectavatar?size=small&pid=10200&avatarId=10010"
            },
            "id": "10200",
            "key": "INF",
            "name": "Infrastructure"
        },
        "timetracking": {},
        "components": [],
        "issuetype": {
            "name": "Infrastructure",
            "self": "https://yada-yada.atlassian.net/rest/api/2/issuetype/9",
            "iconUrl": "https://yada-yada.atlassian.net/images/icons/genericissue.gif",
            "subtask": false,
            "id": "9",
            "description": "Things that the team will need to spend time working on but which don't actually deliver any value."
        },
        "resolution": {
            "self": "https://yada-yada.atlassian.net/rest/api/2/resolution/1",
            "id": "1",
            "name": "Fixed",
            "description": "A fix for this issue is checked into the tree and tested."
        },
        "workratio": -1
    },
    "self": "https://yada-yada.atlassian.net/rest/api/2/issue/15913",
    "id": "15913",
    "expand": "renderedFields,names,schema,transitions,operations,editmeta,changelog"
}

So, unless I'm missing something it looks like you cannot access an issue's history via the REST API.

My work around is to screen scrape this information via selenium.

Before I go down this path can someone tell me if I am missing a trick and there is a less brittle / time consuming way of doing this?

I am using the hosted JIRA fo which AFAIK the only API access is via REST.

Thanks

Chris

[Jobin Kuruvilla [Adaptavist]]

Nope. You can find available methods here: http://docs.atlassian.com/jira/REST/latest/

[Théo Fleury]

Hello, in PowerShell I created this function :

function Get-JiraIssueChangelog {

Param (
[Parameter(Mandatory)]
$Issue,
[Parameter(Mandatory)]
$Server,
[Parameter(Mandatory)]
$Headers
)
#https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-questions/Is-it-possible-to-get-the-issue-history-using-the-REST-API/qaq-p/510094

<#

$uri = “https://xxx.atlassian.net/rest/api/latest/issue/YYYY-100/changelog?startAt=0&maxResults=100”
$projectIssuePage = Invoke-RestMethod $uri -Method ‘GET’ -Headers $headers
$projectIssuePage

#>

try {
return (Invoke-RestMethod -Method Get -Uri "$Server/rest/api/2/search?jql=key=$Issue&expand=changelog" -Headers $Headers).issues.changelog.histories;
#Invoke-RestMethod -Method Get -Uri "$Server/rest/api/latest/issue/$Issue/changelog?startAt=0&maxResults=100” -Headers $Headers;

}
catch {
$_
}
}

function Get-JiraIssueTransition {

Param (
[Parameter(Mandatory)]
$Issue,
[Parameter(Mandatory)]
$Server,
[Parameter(Mandatory)]
$Headers
)

$object_Histories = Get-JiraIssueChangelog -Issue $Issue -Server $Server -Headers $Headers;

$object_Transitions = @();

foreach ($object_History in $object_Histories){
foreach($object_item in $object_History.items){
if($object_item.field -EQ 'status')
{
$object_Transitions += [pscustomobject]@{
author = $object_History.author.name
date = (Get-Date $object_History.created)
to = $object_item.toString
from = $object_item.fromString
}
}
}
}

return $object_Transitions;
}

[Johannes Spangenberg]

The endpoint

/rest/api/latest/issue/YYYY-100/changelog

does not exist on my instance. Maybe it was introduces in a later version. However, I also cannot find this endpoint in the latest documentation.

Jira 8.13.1 (atlassian.com)

Where did you find this endpoint?

[MattS]

Interestingly there is an expand parameter for the search method, so it ought to be possible to retrieve issues with the changelog directly from a search. At the moment with jira-python I'm still having to do a second call such as

issue = jira.issue('FOO-100', expand='changelog')

It would be great to avoid the second network round trip, but performance was not as bad as I thought. I ended up running a search, getting the changelog for each issue and updating the reporter at a rate of about one issue per second.

[VIKAS KUMAR]

Hi Chris,

Can you please post your full code so that i can have a better exposer of REST, since i am a new user to it.

It will be really helpfull for my work experience with JIRA.

I am working on same task to retrieve Issue History with a Jira ticket.

Thanks !

[Dieter Arand]

OK, I guess I found the problem.

We are using Jira 4.3.3 and it looks like, that this interface is not supported for that version.

Also '?fields' does not work.

So any other idea how I can get the change history for an item or can get access to single fields with my version?

[Dieter Arand]

Hi,

I'm using the REST interface in Excel with VBA.

I know that expand=changelog should do the job, but I get the same result either with this expresson or without it.

I attached my test code and both DEebig.Print deliver exactly the same result

Any idea what's wrong?

Many Thanks!

Dieter

Private JiraService As New MSXML2.XMLHTTP60
Private JiraAuth As New MSXML2.XMLHTTP60
Public sRestAntwort As String

Sub JiraAccess()
With JiraAuth
    .Open "POST", "http://JiraServer/rest/auth/1/session", False
    .setRequestHeader "Content-Type", "application/json"
    .setRequestHeader "Accept", "application/json"
    .Send " {""username"" : ""user"", ""password"" : ""passwd""}"""
    sCookie = "JSESSIONID=" & Mid(sErg, 42, 32) & "; Path=/Jira"
End With

With JiraService
    .Open "GET", "http://JiraServer/rest/api/2.0.alpha1/issue/JRA-444", False
    .setRequestHeader "Content-Type", "application/json"
    .setRequestHeader "Accept", "application/json"
    .setRequestHeader "Set-Cookie", sCookie
    .Send
    sRestAntwort = .responseText
    Debug.Print "*************************"
    Debug.Print .responseText
    Debug.Print "*************************"
End With

With JiraService
    .Open "GET", "http://JiraServer/rest/api/2.0.alpha1/issue/JRA-444?expand=changelog", False
    .setRequestHeader "Content-Type", "application/json"
    .setRequestHeader "Accept", "application/json"
    .setRequestHeader "Set-Cookie", sCookie
    .Send
    sRestAntwort = .responseText
    Debug.Print "*************************"
    Debug.Print .responseText
    Debug.Print "*************************"
End With

With JiraAuth
    .Open "DELETE", "http://JiraServer/rest/auth/1/session", False
    .Send
End With
End Sub