Why does the R4J JIRA Excel plugin download and scan an entire project when uploading.

[Stuart Donaldson]

When trying to upload some updated issues via the JIRA Excel plugin, it appears to download an entire project (thousands of records) and then scan them, searching for the records that have changed, rather than just downloading the records identified by the keys in the spreadsheet.

Under some circumstances I have not isolated yet, I get an error trying to upload that it could not find a given ID, even though that ID had just been loaded with the Load Data command.

Can I get an explanation of how this works under the covers that would help me to adjust the approach I am taking or set my expectations around how the plugin is intended to work?

[Ralf Purr]

Disclaimer: I am a employee of the vendor, Ease Solutions.

Hi @Stuart Donaldson

first, did you try the very latest version of our JIRA Excel plugin? You can find it here:

https://easesolutions.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/REQ4J/pages/6979586/R4J+MS+Excel+Plugin

To answer your question, I've seen two occurences when this happens:

1.  You started with a new Excel file and loaded multiple rows, then manually deleted some and changed existining ones. When you upload the data now, you will see that the original numbers of items will be queried. This behaviour will not occur if you limit the number of issues queried in the first place.
2. You used a query like 'issue in requirementsPath("<some project>\<some folder>)'. We have just noticed that this will result in querying all project items during the upload and are already working on a fix. 

The expected behaviour is that only the changed data (marked in yellow when you click the "Check" icon in the ribbon) will be checked for changes, not all items present in the project or the Excel sheet. 

Second, you can take a look at the log file being created - check your "%APPDATA%\ease solutions\Office to Jira Integration" directory for the log file and let us know the entries. 

We also invite you to create a ticket in our Service Desk Portal (https://easesolutions.atlassian.net/servicedesk/customer/portal/2) where we provide free support for all active or evaluation license users. 

Best regards,

Ralf

Goodie 1: Did you already notice that you can add new issues to JIRA using our JIRA Excel Plugin? Just specify all mandatory fields in a row and leave the column "key" empty - upon uploading the date a new issue will be created with that data and the new key will be written into the column "key"

Goodie 2: Upon loading data, include the "RequirementsPath" column. You can then move the items into a requirement folder by specifying the project name and the folder like "Project A/User Stories/Customer B".