JIRA Import - user/commenter not found, using currently logged on user

[Philip Colmer]

I'm trying to migrate a whole bunch of bug reports off another system into JIRA.

Some of the bug reports were either created by or commented on by people who don't have accounts on JIRA. As a result, the importer is replacing their name with that of the logged-on user (i.e. me, as I'm running the import).

Is there any way to prevent this as we need to preserve that information, or should I try and embed that into the comment or the bug summary?

Thanks.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted solution]

To import into the reporter or commented by people, then they have to be Jira users.

Two options I've used in the past -

1. Create them as Jira users. Even if the accounts are "dummy" ones that can't log in (dead email address, and don't belong to any groups so they can't do anything and don't count as licence seats)

2. As you've already thought - embed the information as a comment.

[Philip Colmer]

Thanks for your answer.

I am slightly annoyed at myself for not thinking of the option to create them as dummy JIRA users :-).

Having said that, JIRA seems to be doing that anyway ... for SOME people. That is what seems to be catching me out. I cannot spot a pattern as to why JIRA would create a dummy account (which I can identify because of the use of the default @example.com email suffix) and why it would fail for other accounts. All I get in the import log is

Commenter named xxx not found. Creating issue with current logged in user instead

where xxx is a lower case concatenation of the full name provided in the comment field.

If anyone has any suggestions as to when an account is created and when it isn't, that would be very helpful.

Thanks.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Hmm, is there a pattern as to what it's creating?

Let's say:

• Alice has commented
• Bob is a reporter
• Chuck has both reported and commented

Then let's say that the import creates Bob and Chuck, but not Alice, then you can kind of assume that it's parsing the import for "reporter", creating them, correctly assigning Chuck on a comment later, but ignoring Alice because she's only commented. (End "clutching at straws" thoughts)

[Philip Colmer]

It looks like JIRA will automatically create the accounts if the user is the reporter - possibly also the assignee but I haven't tested that scenario. It definitely doesn't create the accounts for commenters.

That is annoying because the REST API doesn't support creating of users otherwise I'd add that to my code. Calling the SOAP API from C# seems to be more problematic than is worth given what I'm trying to do with this migration. Easier to create the accounts by hand :-(.