How to migrate tickets along with tickets history to new environment in Jira

[pawan sharma]

Hi All,

i am trying to mugrate my issues from our legacy environment to jira but i am not able to map ticket history of my existing issues to jira, can someone suggest any best practices or method on, how i can capture old ticket history from different tool to jira history during migration.

Thanks,

Pawan

[satyakam panigrahi · Accepted solution]

Can any body please answer whether it is possible to update History field of JIRA via CLI ??

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

It is not possible to update the history of an issue in the UI, with the CLI or anything else.

Also, bear in mind that it's not a "history field", it's multiple records of change that are displayed in one place.

You can import historical data as part of a data import, but only some of the importers support it.

[Wojciech Seliga]

Importing issue history into JIRA is currently supported only by JSON Importer (part of JIRA Importers Plugin which is bundled with JIRA) - https://confluence.atlassian.com/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=293830712. CSV does not support, nor there are any plans to support it there (due to limitations of the file structure).

[satyakam panigrahi]

Thanks Nic, Can you please let me know the most convinient way of converting CSV to JSON ??

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Use whatever script or language base you are comfortable with. You've mentioned Perl already, so I'd use that.

Although, frankly, I'd bin your CSV - instead of going ddts -> CSV -> JSON, just go ddts -> JSON

[satyakam panigrahi]

Are you saying there is option of getting the exported file from DDTS in JSON format,

if it is so then can you please brief me about the procedure, that will be a great help ...

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

I don't know. You should look at the DDTS documentation to see if it does anything close.

What I'm trying to tell you is that you need the data in JSON format that the Jira importer can understand. You managed to convert it to CSV, so you should be able to do something similar to get it to JSON.

[satyakam panigrahi]

can some one please answer to my querry ?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

You already have an answer above.

You can NOT import history via CSV. You need to manipulate your data to a JSON formatted shape so that you can use the Jira Importer module

[satyakam panigrahi]

Hi Seliga,

Using Perl script we are able to accomodate multiple evevnts in to a single cell in CSV file,

(basically we removed the new line characeter with the help of perl script that enabled us to accomodate all the events for a single CR to be captured in to a single cell),

But our chalenge now is: how we can map the History field of theCSV file to JIRA History ?

because :"History" in JIRA is not a field(its a deafult Tab), so it does not get listed under the field list for mapping during import.

[satyakam panigrahi]

Thanks Seliga for your info, Let me explain you little more about my issue: I have exported records from clear DDTS in the form of CSV file(which is having History field in it), so how this CSV file can be converted to JSON file ?

[Wojciech Seliga]

I don't know how CSV represents a history. I suppose it's in a quite awkard way, as a history is usually about multiple events referring to a single issue, which is difficult to represent in CSV format where each row corresponds to a single issue.

You would have to write a script to convert your data into JSON format - which has strict expectations wrt the structure. It could be easier in your case, to resign from CSV completely and write the exporter directly from ClearDDTS into JIM JSON format.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

As far as I am aware, the CSV import does not handle issue history (I've not used it in Jira 5 or 6 yet for full system migrations). I'm not sure it could directly, because Jira issue history is in one particular structure and CSV doesn't lend itself to complex structures.

As soon as you want history of incoming issues, I start looking at the other importers, scripts, jelly, etc.

[satyakam panigrahi]

Thanks very much Nic for the info,

Yes, please let me know if u come across any possible solution using other importers,scripts...

[satyakam panigrahi]

Hi Nic,

Similar query i do have,

Just to make the issue more speciific;

Notes: the challenge here is, History is not a field in JIRA its listed under Activity,

hence, while importing the CSV file it does not get listed as a JIRA field so it not possible to map any field from CSV file to History in JIRA.

Thanks,

Satyakam

[pawan sharma]

Hi Nic,

Thanks for reply, My Legacy environment is ClearDDTS...

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

There's no importer I know of. I'm afraid you're probably into "some form of export, data manipulation and then import".

Two ideas that would be worth a look

1. https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRA/Migrating+from+Other+Issue+Trackers - for the generalised ideas behind the imports

2. Im not familiar with ClearDDTS, but I've used (and migrated off) ClearQuest and I'm guessing there may be some similarities. Even if not, this is still worth a read - https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/ATLAS/JIRA+Cookbook+-+Migration+off+IBM+Rational+ClearQuest

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

It's really not possible to answer this question without knowing something about the source data.

I could tell you "do a load of work to change the shape of the data into something Jira understands", or at the other extreme, "write something in Jira that understands and imports your data".

Both extremes could be valid, but there's no way to tell you how far along that scale to go without understanding your data.

What is this legacy system to begin with?