Import Issue Data

Owned by Rosen Marinkov
Last updated: Sept 28, 2023
4 min read

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Issue data

With Configuration Manager for Jira (CMJ), you can migrate the issue data for one or more projects from one Jira instance to another, preserving all comments, links, history, worklog, custom field values, agile data, and more.

The following use cases are supported:

  • New project deployment - аdd a new project and import all of its issues.

  • Incremental deployment - import new issues into an existing project.

When you deploy a Projects with Issues snapshot, in the Analyze import data page of the deployment wizard, you can review the issue data-related changes, which will be applied to the current Jira instance.

Changes are organized in a table, each row representing a single project from the snapshot. For each project, you can review issue counters and a summary of the planned changes if required.

Issue import states

Issue data from the snapshot might be imported for projects that are new to this system and for existing projects, and depending on that, there are different states for the projects:

Add project and its issues

A new project will be added to the target Jira instance, and all of its issues will be imported into it.

Modify existing project

Issues from the snapshot will be imported into an existing project on the target Jira instance.

No issues to import

There are no issues in the snapshot for the specific project, or the existing project already contains the same issues as in the snapshot.

Counters

For each project from the snapshot, there are three issue counters displayed during deployment.

The counters are:

  • Snapshot - shows the number of issues in the snapshot for the specific project.

  • Existing - shows the number of issues in the existing project on the target Jira instance. The issue number is used to determine if an issue should be deployed or skipped.

For example, your snapshot contains issues with keys ABC-1, ABC-2, ABC-5, and ABC-20. Meanwhile, in the target project, you have issues with keys XYZ-1, XYZ-2, TXYZ-4, and XYZ-10.

CMJ will see that there are issues with keys 1, 2, 4, and 10 in the target project, and it will оnly import issues 5 and 20 from the snapshot because they are the only ones missing.

CMJ won’t care that the base part of the project keys are different (ABC vs. XYZ); it only sees and compares the issue numbers.

  • New - shows the number of new issues that will be imported to the existing project on the target Jira instance.

Deploying multiple projects

Deploying multiple projects with issue data is fully supported. During the deployment, CMJ searches for existing projects on the target instance. If a snapshot project is already present, CMJ adds only the new issues to the target project. Otherwise, a new project is created, and all its issue data is deployed.

Deploying issue links

During the deployment, CMJ creates all issue links that are exported with the snapshot as long as the destination issues exist in the target instance or in the snapshot.

Example:
In my instance, Project A and Project B have linked issues. I deploy only Project A to my target instance. Then, I deploy Project B. All issue links between Project A and Project B will be created as long as the project keys are not changed during the deployment!


For more information on migrating projects with issue data, please refer to the following article:
Move Projects (with Issue Data)

 

For more details on reviewing the results of an issue data migration, see:
Review Imported Issue Data