Does JIRA attempt to parse dates within comments?

[James Frank]

I am importing a CSV file. I get an error parsing comment. It's a date parsing error. Is jira actually scanning the coment to try and find dates within the comment?

[pborkowski]

Hello James!

JIRA Data Importer allow user to have a comment in special format, which allows you to specify comment's date and author via single Comment column. An example of this format can be found in our CSV Documentation (https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRA/Importing+Data+from+CSV- Importing Attachments section ).

In your case I believe that import has found a pattern of this special comment with a date and Author, that's why Importer tries to parse a date out of comment. However this is shown for you are as a warning. If importer fails during an attempt of parsing comment parts, it just imports comment "as is" without modifying it. So if you didn't try to import a comment in this special format, you can ignore the warnings and date errors - your comments should be imported correctly.

[James Frank]

I was not trying to import in a special format, at least I did not think so. I'm just trying to remove as many errors as possible. I'm also getting an attachment error for every line I am importing even though I have no attachments. Don't really know what is causing that, but I can ignore it for now.

[pborkowski]

These attachemt errors is a bug in our Plugin (https://ecosystem.atlassian.net/browse/JIM-1120). It happens when user is trying to perform an CSV Import with "Issue Key" mapping. As long as you are not importing attachments via CSV you can ignore this error.

[Mirek]

Hi James,

You need to take a closer look where you are getting the error and see if dates in a CSV file are correct. When importing from a CSV file you can set a specific time of a comment.

Please remember to use the syntax that complies with the Java SimpleDateFormat and it need to be the same like in second step of the wizard.

I hope that will help.

Best Regards,

Mirek

[James Frank]

Mirek,

Thanks for the assistance. Here is the test I just ran. I imported the CSV with the field in question mapped to "Comment Body" and saw the errors. Then I imported the CSV again but unselected the field. No errors. This would seem to tell me that all the CSV colums are correct, but that JIRA is trying to read the comment body and look for dates for some reason, not just importing the comment as a text blob.

If JIRA is looking inside the comment, then I know I have to fix dates in the comment. this is my question.

[James Frank]

Even more testing reveals that the real problem is the (;) semi colon. Importing a comment body from a CSV, JIRA does not like a semi colon in it. The date error is a false hit.