#8122 Add a ForgeImporter for JIRA Tickets
As discussed previously, adding an importer for issues hosted on JIRA would ease convincing projects to use Allura.
JIRA provides a method to backup issues.
https://confluence.atlassian.com/adminjiracloud/exporting-issues-776636787.html
The backup includes the following data:
Issues
Users and their group settings
Avatars
Attachments if selected
In XML format.
We already have an importer for GitHub, and the code /ForgeImporters/forgeimporters/github/tracker.py for it's ticket importer can be used for reference.
I have started working on this and with the merge of this with the codebase I think would be a good time to approach Apache projects in the Incubator.
JIRA also has a REST API which is another way data could be loaded in. https://docs.atlassian.com/jira/REST/cloud/ I wonder if the formats are similar and we could support both, or if we'll need to pick just one.
The backup export seems like you might have to be an Admin to use it, which might not work for everyone. The REST API requires direct access to the server and login credentials for it, which wouldn't work if the server is behind a firewall, or simply people don't want to share their credentials.
I also see an "export" link with many options, when looking at a list of tickets, e.g. on upper right of https://issues.apache.org/jira/issues/?jql=text%20~%20%22allura%22%20and%20labels%20%3D%20gsoc2016 Anyone can use that, plus you can do it for just certain tickets if you only want to migrate some tickets. Maybe that is a good option?
I just tried the export button on the issues page.
And it gives the issues in XML format but I guess it is limited to 100, maybe there would be a way to paginate through all the issues. When clicking on the JSON format, it says that we require admin access.
Anyways, since XML is a format that seems to be widely supported by JIRA when we export; I'm going to try parse it and save it into Allura. We can explore into what would be the best way to approach bulk importing. The backup option seems to be the easiest but as you pointed out, would only be available to an admin user. Export link seems to work, and would require automating the process using a user account.
Will need to look into the REST API and see what would be the most convenient and decide if we want to offer both or just one single method.
Last edit: Rohan Verma 2016-08-29