Bulk-change tasks to become subtasks of a particular issue

[Hanna N.]

I want to bulk change a many series of subtasks to become children of certain tasks, after having imported a Microsoft Project plan into Jira. It doesn't seem to be possible (?) and it's taking me forever to do this one-by-one... Any tips?

[Hanna N.]

Getting annoyed as I spent all morning on this, and it was very obvious what was the parent, in MSP. I had added the parent name for all imported tasks in a particular Jira field, assuming there'd be a way to bulk change. Yet I have to do EACH DARN TASK by hand, and there are 5 steps to attach a task to another task. COME ON Atlassian. No functionality for this, and no workaround? I can hardly be the first person up against this.

[Martin]

https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRA-13245 is ready in Jira 7

[Hanna N.]

Yeah, this organisation needs a collaboration tool, BADLY! Everything is currently done off MSP, using a particularly antiquated old Prince2 approach. The fiddling around with MSP plans of thousands of rows, multiple baselines is just excruciating. As a PM I am forced to spend most of my time just keeping this monster up to date and it's still not really helping anyone, least alone me. So me and a few others are trying to get a JIRA trial going. But we've got to get things up and running FAST, and we've got to show that in an interim period it's possible to adhere to the existing MSP based approach. The flexibility of Agile would do wonders, but we can't rock the boat too much... Not sure if I can pull it off. Getting JIRA into shape was a lot more timeconsuming than I had expected. We are using the OnDemand for the trial. If we got it right it can be revolutionary. If not, I will have lost a few work days.

I had to use "THE BRIDGE" plugin by Cephta, none other works with OnDemand (I think there is another one, forgot the name, that is more user friendly and has more features).

I realise now, that I could probably have exported everything to Excel and imported into Excel without any plugins at all. Oh well.

@Rambanam -- thanks for the tip. Don't have time to get up to scratch with scripts right now.... Besides my technical skills are rusty, it's been a long time... ;-) Thanks anyway!

[RambanamP]

i think the best way is doing it through script!!

normally if we get some requirement to do bulk operation we will develop our won REST api

if you intrested to in this way check this document to know how to develop REST plugin

https://developer.atlassian.com/display/DOCS/REST+Plugin+Module

https://developer.atlassian.com/display/DOCS/Developing+a+REST+Service+Plugin

[Hanna N.]

Thanks for the response Randall. That sounds like a possible workaround to try next time, but still very complicated. I wouldn't know exactly how to go about it, and it would probably take me a while to figure out and get it right. For the time being, I spent 5 precious hours on doing this manually, for 400 tasks.... The whole trial could have fallen on this actually. Who's got 5 hours to sit and dumb-click through screen after screen for 400 issues.... ?! Arrgh..

[Randall Robertson]

@Hanna, Sorry to hear it was so painful. MS Project and JIRA are different in their approaches and design, so migrating from Project to JIRA can be painful. Project is a little more top-down oriented (start with the major milestones and work down to the details) and JIRA is a little more bottom-up oriented (start with the details and work up to major milestones). Although the usefulness of Greenhopper is making this less of a problem, we still have people in our organization who prefer Project or similar Gantt-style management tools to JIRA. Fortunately, the Project-oriented plugins for JIRA have gotten a lot better in the last few years. Are you using any Gantt-style or Project-friendly plugins in your JIRA system?

[Randall Robertson]

Can you export the tasks that are to be moved using the excel export in issue navigator and then import the sub-tasks through the csv importer? Then you could just bulk delete the original tasks you were planning to move. Haven't tried that, but I seem to recall the importer being updated to allow for sub-task import.