How to add comments to existing Jira Service Desk Issues via API and preserve Comment Date and Time

[Tim Prentis]

This concerns data migration from a different Ticket system into Jira Service Desk.

I am able to import issues into Jira Service desk and am able to create comments for these issues via API, however, I want to preserve the comment 'added' Date Time in the comment, Currently, Jira uses the current Date/Time and also uses the User ID that is being used to log in.  How can we control what goes in that 'created' field using the API?

[David_Bakkers]

I don't think it can be done. The time a comment was added was the time it was added and the person who added the comment was the person who added it.

The REST API can only lookup those values, not alter them, the same as if you were using the web interface.

[Tim Prentis]

Ok, thanks, I found that using the 'JSON External System Import' in lieu of the API solves this particular problem. Now on to figuring out how to import the 'Organizations' field using JSON?  Has anybody tackled this yet?

[David_Bakkers]

Thanks for the update. It's interesting that the JSON import method allows the author and created values to be set when the comment is being created, whereas the REST API doesn't.

The latest REST API docs say you can get and set the properties of a comment using the /rest/api/2/comment/{commentId}/properties/ endpoint. I just tried using that method to get all the properties of an existing comment, to know what I could set, but all that came back was an empty array called 'keys' with no sub-fields in it. That new REST API feature is marked as experimental, so maybe the functionality is yet to be properly implemented.