Export issues without permissions taking effect?

[Deleted user]

Hello, as a sysadmin I need to export all jira issues regarding a certain team to csv. Using Issue Search only those issues are displayed (and can be exported in a second step) that I can see with my permissions. What I need would be to see all issues regarding that specific team nevertheless if I have the permission for a single issue or project. Is that possible?

I mean as sysadmin I can grant me view permission and stuff for every project but we have around 500 projects configured which will take years to grant and to deleted afterwards. At the moment the issue csv export is not feasible for me since I cannot verify if all issues shown with my filter are all existing issues.

Any option maybe with database or stuff? Basically something like "All issues with customfield_10000 = Team Germany".

[Alexis Robert · Accepted solution]

Hi @[deleted] , 

if you don't have permissions to view the issues in the projects as a user, then you won't be able to export them. This is actually a good thing, because otherwise it would be a security issue if anyone (including an admin) could export issues that they don't have permission to see.

Depending on how roles and permissions are handled on your Jira instance, you could try to add yourself to a group that gives permission to see issues on the projects (very often there is a generic admin group that has permissions as Project admin).

You can also update your permission scheme, if it's shared accross all projects it could be a quick way to get access to issues.

You can have a look at this answer on Community where a user had a similar issue : https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-Service-Management/Give-permission-to-all-projects-to-administrator-users/qaq-p/1783739

Let me know if this helps, 

--Alexis

[Deleted user]

Hi Alexis,

thanks for your reply. Damn I thought there would be an easy workaround or smth. Of course its good that you are not able to export stuff you dont own the permission for but as sysadmin I can grant me permission to everything anyway + database access. I thought there might be an easy way to deal with that since we use hundreds of permission schemes, projects and stuff this will be a pain to put myself or jira-administrators into all of them or to verify which projects I might be missing.

Shouldve configured jira-administrators as a standard into all of them from the bginning I guess.

Cheers

Christoph

[Radek Dostál]

Exactly the point you're making there is what I don't like about the argument about restrictions. An admin can just automate this and get full access to all issues (without needing to be a sysadmin). It would of course not be ideal for legitimate usage though.

Edit: although I must slightly disagree with the requirement being put on you, because an admin is (from my practice) never information owner for all the data on the instance, it's the projects/users who are responsible for what they put in it

Is there any specific data you're looking to get for those issues? Because if you just need something specific out of them there could be an easy way to get that from the db, or if you have Insight/ScriptRunner plugins (both allow groovy scripts) then you could use an issue search with java API which has a "overridesecurity" method, unlike issue navigator which lacks it terribly.

[Deleted user]

Hi Radek,

not really. I need every field with value to be exported since we need to import it within another jira instance again or as backup for future plans.

[Radek Dostál]

You really want to do an xml backup for such things:

https://confluence.atlassian.com/adminjiraserver/backing-up-data-938847673.html

Without .xml backup you're not going to be able to export:

 - attachments, depending on how savvy you are at scripting

 - comments, depending on how savvy you are at scripting

 - change history

 - ranking

 - sprint data (I think that's part of outofbox xml backup)

 - issue links

 - potentially epic links, depending on how well you map the keys and the order of issues in rows

 - potentially subtasks, depending on how well you map ids/parentids and the order of issues in rows

 - anything else I forgot

There are several plugins which provide far superior functionality for backups, but if you're just looking for something small and simple the out of box backup will do the job - however it is on project level, it's nothing to do with specific issues or subset of - just the whole project backup.