Safely Deleting Change History Records

[Daniel Garcia]

I have a number of derived fields which create noise in the issue change log. I'd like to remove these from the log.

I've had a read of https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-questions/Is-it-possible-to-delete-History-records-of-an-issue-like-the/qaq-p/254441 and take note of the warnings. I've also had a look at the code for com.atlassian.jira.issue.changehistory.removeAllChangeItems(Issue issue) in order to understand what it is doing and adapt it to my needs.

I'm wondering if the following code is the correct/safe way to delete change items, without needing to shutdown and restart the service.

import com.atlassian.jira.component.ComponentAccessor
import com.atlassian.jira.issue.changehistory.ChangeHistoryManager
import com.atlassian.jira.issue.changehistory.ChangeHistory
import com.atlassian.jira.entity.property.JsonEntityPropertyManager
import com.atlassian.jira.entity.Entity
import com.atlassian.jira.entity.property.EntityPropertyType
import com.atlassian.jira.ofbiz.OfBizDelegator

List<String> fieldsToRemove = ["Field Name 1", "Field Name 2", "Field Name 3"]

ChangeHistoryManager changeHistoryManager = 
    ComponentAccessor.getChangeHistoryManager()
JsonEntityPropertyManager jsonEntityPropertyManager =
    ComponentAccessor.getComponent(JsonEntityPropertyManager)
OfBizDelegator ofBizDelegator = ComponentAccessor.getOfBizDelegator()

List<ChangeHistory> history = changeHistoryManager.getChangeHistories(issue)
history.each{ChangeHistory ch ->
    Boolean allDeleted = null
    ch.changeItems.each {
        Long changeItemId = it.get("id")
        String field = it.get("field")
        if (fieldsToRemove.contains(field)) {
            if (allDeleted==null) {
                allDeleted = true
            }
            ofBizDelegator.removeByAnd(Entity.Name.CHANGE_ITEM,
                                       [id: changeItemId].asImmutable())
        } else {
            allDeleted = false
        }
    }

    if (allDeleted) {
        ofBizDelegator.removeByAnd(Entity.Name.CHANGE_GROUP, 
                                   [id: ch.id].asImmutable())
        jsonEntityPropertyManager.deleteByEntity(
            EntityPropertyType.CHANGE_HISTORY_PROPERTY.getDbEntityName(),
            ch.id)
    }
}

[Marcus Watkins]

Did this end up working out for you? We're considering something similar and testing of your approach seems fine. I'd love to know if you ran into any issues, though.