CSV bulk upload in JIRA

[Manali Butey]

I am in the process of setting up a JIRA project for my team . Whilst I get setup I need to circulate a template to the team so they can start populating and I can use it later to bulk upload all to JIRA.  2 questions on the columns for bulk upload:
1. assignee field - should the team be populating the username / full name / email address of an existing user in JIRA?

2. Plan to create the epic -> feature -> user story -> task hierarchy. I understand that i will need an issueID, issuetype column and for the linkages I will have to have multiple columns with outward links. These outward link columns i think need to be populated with the issue ID. but cause none of these have been created in JIRA how do I know which issue ID i should start with. Also, there are multiple resources who will work separately to populate the template and should not have clashing issue ID's. Do i pick a random issue ID say 10000 and assign to one team to start, and 30000 to another team ? 
P.S there will be more columns than stated above such as summary, dates , etc. The ones stated above is where is confusion lies.

[Trudy Claspill · Accepted solution]

Hello @Manali Butey 

Here is a link to a reference document about importing from CSV.

https://confluence.atlassian.com/adminjiraserver/importing-data-from-csv-938847533.html

Concerning your first question, you need to provide usernames that match to valid usernames already set up in JIRA, and those users in JIRA must have the Assignable User permission in the destination project.

With regard to your second question, concerning linking issues during import, when the issues you want to link are actually being created by the import.

The way to do that is to first create an artificial Issue ID field in your input data, and populate that with a unique value per issue. Example:

Issue ID, Issue Type, Summary
1, Epic, First Epic
2, Story, First Issue

Then you use that unique Issue ID in the field where you want to create the link. For example if you want the above story to be a child of the epic:

Issue ID, Issue Type, Summary, Epic Link
1, Epic, First Epic
2, Story, First Issue, 1

When you are mapping the fields during the import process, map the Issue ID column to the Issue Key field.

The import process will use your artificial Issue ID value to keep track of how to link the issues together. First it will import each issue, internally keeping track of the actual issue ID assigned in JIRA as the issues are created. Then it will make another pass through your import file and create the links between them.

You can indeed give each team a block of numbers to use for the artificial Issue ID when they are contributing to the import data file. You will want to double check the final file to make sure there are no accidental duplicates.

[Manali Butey]

Hi @Trudy Claspill  - Thanks for the detailed response.  Following up on that, as I am trying to create the Epic -> Feature -> user story -> task hierarchy, does the csv format below look right to you?

Issue ID, Issue Type, Summary, Epic Link, Outward link 1, outward link 2, outward link 3
1, Epic, First Epic, , 2,3
2, Feature, First Feature, 1, 4
3, Feature, Second Feature, 1,5 
4, Story, story 1,1 , 6
5, Story, story 2,1 , 7
6, Task, task 1, 1
7, Task, task 2, 1
8, Epic, Second Epic, ,9,10
9, Feature, Third Feature, 8, 11
10, Feature, Fourth Feature,8, 12
11, Story, story 3, 8,13,14
12, Story, story 4,8
13, Task, task 3,8
14, Task, task 4,8

[Trudy Claspill]

Hello @Manali Butey 

First, are you trying to import to a Company Managed or a Team Managed project? I work with Company Managed projects and there may be some differences when importing to Team Managed projects.

Second, how have you set up your issue hierarchy? Are you using a tool like Roadmaps? We use only the built-in basic hierarchy of Epic > Story > Sub-task in Company Managed projects, so I haven't actually worked with trying to import a hierarchy with 4 levels.

Third, you might want to manually create some issues in a project that follow your hierarchy, then use the Search screen to list them all and export the results to an Excel CSV file. That will show you what fields are being used to store the link information, which will help you make sure that you map the fields correctly when you import the data.

[Manali Butey]

Hi @Trudy Claspill 

JIRA is a company wide toll for us and is hosting multiple projects, ours being one of them. The import will only be to one project. 

For the issue hierarchy set up I plan to use the issue linkage, a custom parent-child relationship, and then add Structure plugin on top of it to represent the hierarchy in a visually presentable way.

Have taken your suggestion and downloaded a csv and used the same to create the required columns for the import. The csv template is out with the team atm. Will update this reply with result of upload when I try it.\