The reason why it is useful is not the lack of something in JIRA.
You may have JIRA instances in sub-networks, not accessible from a meeting room where you organize a CCB, or from outside your company for security reasons. Then, usually, the common way to proceed is for the Project Manager to extract info in an Excel sheet, from JIRA, working with people concerned, and then he comes back to JIRA, and ... cries because he's got to update all the tickets manually

https://studio.atlassian.com/browse/JIM-257

I agree this would be a helpful addition to have. We have to use 2 databases JIRA and Dev Track(Publishers Side) and it would be nice to be able to import bugs from Dev Track to the JIRA project frequently so that it is all up to date. At this moment that doesn't seem possible without a lot of work. It would also be good to use at an early phase of task building for a project. If we could import updated material as tasks are fleshed out rather than having to update each task individually it would stream line everything more.

Does that mean that there is no hope to see this improvment in the next releases ?
It is important for us to know if we start development by our own or if we wait for the next release...
I agree with Hardjono Harjadi, we need the same thing : in meetings with customers, we don't have any connection with Jira. Only one excel sheet where we update/create issues....

I suspect the only reason you use Excel is because Jira doesn't have a spreadsheet like way to mass edit issues (that's why we did)
We now use Greenhopper instead. Its not like a spreadsheet but it does most of what we were doing in the spreadsheet.
There can definitely be improvements in the UI (for speed and ease of working) but its good enough to dump trying to extend CVS import.

Hi,

I need this functionality too. I would be highly obliged if Atlassian would let us know if they plan on creating this feature in the web interface itself or we should go by Anton suggestion of using a SOAP client.

Writing a SOAP client seems a lot more work than changing the code, as pointed out by Emmanuel

Thanks,
Ashish

I'm also very interested in this feature !
Actually it could be simple to adapt csv import in order to be able to modify issues not only to create issues.
If the issue id is present in the database -> it is an update of an issue.
If the issue id is not present in the database -> it is a creation of an issue.

It can take a lot of time if we had to develop this feature with soap. And no macro for excel is provided.

We would very much like to have this feature. Editing issues in Excel would be an extremely handy feature for updating our database.

Hi,
vote for this feature!

Any status update?

Ideally I would like a web based spreadsheet opened for selection issues and specific values from those issues.

Then I can make adjustments in the spreadsheet and "apply" the changes in one go.

I've hacked together a python client that can update the export CSV Jira issues using XML-RPC.

We are using it internally, but the "paint is still a bit wet".

There should be adequate unit tests to enable others to extend this to support their needs. I believe that after you have configured it as per the README it should just work for your environment and that you won't have to write any more code for it.

Ideally I see Atlassian providing a web based tabular update capability which would reduce the need for this tool.

Is this something that Atlassian wont to pick up and provide support for?
Or is this something that should be hosted elsewhere?

Hi vote for this feature!

Absolutely a time saver. My use case is as follows:

We use Agile methodology called scrum, and need to manage user stories in JIRA. I find that I refactor the stories quite frequently - touch a lot of stories and often they have to be updated/rewritten in groups based on new information.

This workflow is much more efficient but also superior in that you can edit the user stories in context:

1: find all the related stories
2: export into an excell sheet
3: refactor the user stories, prioritize in context of the exported lit,
4: then import back into JIRA.

Please up the priority on this request. A rough ETA would be nice. Thanks.

Cheers

Hello Matt,

there is already an issue for your request, but without the excel stage.
The issue asks to make a native jira csv export which can be imported in jira again without reformatting:
JRA-8580

Cheers

Bettina

If this is implemented, it would be nice if the Excel output of the Issue Navigator could, when saved as CVS, be correctly read by the CVS importer.

That way, you could export to Excel, edit the file in a meeting away from the server, and then just import it to update with the changes.

Side Note
Would that be a subtask to this issue or a separate issue linked to this one? It doesn't seem like a separate issue since it's really only an issue if the import updates.

I would find this useful as well. I am using Microsoft Project to schedule projects. I use it mainly for it's ability to level resources and manage moving tasks with interdependencies. In any case, I export task info (summary, description, assignee, due date) from MS Project into a CSV file that I import into JIRA. It would be great if JIRA's CSV import process could identify duplicate issues by summary and update each associated field.

Bettina,

I must admit that no one has actually asked for this before.

One way to programmatically update issues is to write a SOAP client that does this. The client can parse the CSV file and then update the necessary fields through SOAP. For more information on the SOAP acess to JIRA please see:
http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRAEXT/JIRA+RPC+plugin

Would this work for you?

I guess getting CSV to update issues would be possible, but given the nuber of feature requests that we have, it might take us a long while ot get to this.

I hope this helps.

Thanks,
Anton