How to cut down the entities.xml file for different projects manually.

[SANJEEV DAMERA]

Hi,

After exporting the xml backup from the front end of JIRA, can we cut down the entities.xml depending on the projects ?

I mean, i want to separate the issues, custom fields, schemes etc of a particular project and then i want to import that single project. Is it possible manually or by means of any third party service?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted solution]

You could spend a lot of time editing the XML to try to do this, but the second part of your question makes me think you might be missing something.

Jira has two imports from xml:

• Everything: deletes all your current data, and imports everything in the xml
• Project: pulls in the issues from a project in the xml

Given that, my question is "what exactly are you trying to do?". If you want to import the issue data from a project, then you just use project import. If you want to recreate the live system, then import all the xml.

The only useful thing I could think of doing by editing an export file would be to reduce the import time - say you had 100,000 issues but you only wanted the config and a handful of issues - removing 99,000 issues would massively reduce the import. But it's also likely to take you a LOT longer to understand and cleanly edit the xml to do it.

[SANJEEV DAMERA]

Suppose i am having 500 projects in my JIRA among which 400 are inactive. I have to remove these projects from the exported xml file and would like to import only those 100 active projects.

I dont know how to delete those projects from the XML file. I didnot understand the way, the entities.xml file is storing the data. Is there any simple way to delete single project info from that file ?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

No, and that's my point - the xml is not human friendly. Better than machine code, but still immensely unfriendly.

It is almost certainly going to take you a LOT longer to edit the xml safely than it is to import the whole thing and then delete the projects (I'd script the delete - with https://bobswift.atlassian.net/wiki/display/JCLI/JIRA+Command+Line+Interface )

[SANJEEV DAMERA]

Thank you Nic. I will go through this link.