Atlassian apps
Exporting data

Exporting data

You can access the export screen in 2 ways:

  • from the Advanced issue search screen (Filters -> Advanced issue search) by clicking Advanced export icon in the upper right part of the screen
  • from the Dashboard (Apps -> Advanced Export), but clicking on "Create export" or any existing export configurations

Options

Advanced Export view

  • Selecting work items to export: You can select work items to export either by providing JQL or by selecting Board/Sprint. You can also use any Jira issue filter you have defined earlier by clicking From filter.
  • Jira fields: A set of fields to add as report columns. Some custom fields may not be known to the app, in which case you'll see a warning. You can still add them, but they will be presented as plain text, which may not necessarily be what you expect (especially for complex fields which may contain raw JSON or other complex data).

More options are available in 3 separate sections:

Advanced Export view

  • Export history: If checked, the app will export all the changes made to the issues in separate rows. It will also add 4 extra columns:
    • Change Start - the date when the change occurred (creation of the issue for the oldest element of the history)
    • Change End - the date when the change ended (report creation date for the row containing current issue field values)
    • [REMOVED] As Of Date - the date of the change or current date for the row containing values as of now. This column was removed in favour of Change Start/Change End columns.
    • Changed Fields - the list of fields that were changed at that date
    • Change Author - the user who made the change
    • Time In This State - the time the issue spent in the current status
  • Separate issues with empty row: Only appears if exporting history. Since each issue can be exported in multiple rows (depending on how many changes to fields are being exported), you can choose to insert empty row before new issue.
  • Include comments: If the comments field is selected, you can select whether to export All comments, or just internal or external ones
  • Comments in separate columns: If checked, each comment will be exported in separate column

Advanced Export view

  • Locale: you can select one of the predefined locales
  • Time Difference: format of the time difference between 2 dates (used for example for Time In This State column)
  • Date/Time Format: you can select one of the predefined formats

Advanced Export view

  • CSV Separator: only used for CSV export, ignored for other formats
Note

All the dates will be presented in the time zone of the Jira instance, not the time zone of your browser/computer. You'll see information about it in case your browser time zone differes from the Jira instance time zone.

If, for example, your Jira instance is set up to use America/New York time zone, and you are in Europe/London, the dates will be presented in America/New York timezone and will be shifted by 5 hours.

Live preview

The preview is generated in the browser as you change options or add/remove fields or modify JQL. It shows first several issues that match the JQL. It's useful to quickly check if the export is configured correctly and data you need is presented correctly.

Saved configurations

You can save or load export configurations using the top menu on the export page.

Save/load configurations

Saved configurations contain all the options and selected columns.

Save As dialog

Limitations

There's no limit of how many issues or fields you can export. Reports are generated in the browser, so exporting large amount of issues can take a while.

There are 2 solutions for that:

  • Export less issues: use JQL to filter issues to manageable amount
  • Schedule export: you can schedule export to run in the background and send you an email with the results.

Data format

Comments

Comments are exported by default in a single text column, unless you select the Export each comment in a separate column option.

When exported in a single column:

  • comments are sorted latest to oldest
  • format of each comment is: AUTHOR, DATE, COMMENT_BODY
  • column with comments is enclosed with quotes for CSV output (quotes inside comments are escaped with double quotes)
  • comments are separated with: new line - pipe symbol (“|”) - new line, i.e: \n|\n

Example output:

Key,Comment
SSP-28,"Tomasz Kustrzynski, 2024-02-23T10:11:49-05:00:
another comment with “some quotes”, ""different quotes"" and an emoji 😀 
|
Tomasz Kustrzynski, 2024-02-23T09:01:51-05:00:
another comment
|
Tomasz Kustrzynski, 2024-02-23T09:01:47-05:00:
first comment"