YouTrack Export (HTML, PDF, XLS, CSV) and JIRA Import

# YouTrack Export / Jira Import

## Introduction

We are a non-profit charity that provides accessibility consultancy. To this end, we make reports explaining to clients how accessible their websites are.

We have historically made these with Word. Due to the limitations of this, we are moving to an issue tracker—YouTrack.

A lot of our clients cannot access this issue tracker due to security concerns. Others have their own issue tracker, usually JIRA. We thus we need to export the issues.

We have a Python script sitting on a BlueOcean server that queries YouTrack database through the REST API (see https://www.jetbrains.com/help/youtrack/incloud/2019.2/youtrack-rest-api-reference.html).

It then generates a HTML, PDF, CSV, and XLS from the YouTrack issues. It also snatches the attachments (images only, no videos, audio files), etc. and put them in the documents—e.g. as embedded images in the PDF or local file references in the CSV.

It's almost good to go. There is a handful out outstanding quality of life fixes. We would really appreciate some help, and you would be supporting a non-profit charity that tries to change people’s lives.

## Project Admin:

We have the code on a private GitHub project. It is only a few hundred lines code. It is well commented. It's all pretty simple.

The tool we are using include:

• YouTrack (see https://github.com/JetBrains/youtrack-rest-python-library).
• Python 2
• bottle
• Flask
• Jinja
• Markdown
• pdfkit
• requests
• urllib
• XlsxWriter

## Tasks:

### Jira Import Duplication

The main problem with our JIRA import / export is that it exports *everything*.
If we export and they import, that's fine. However, if we update the project, export again, and re-import, duplication occurs.

JIRA allows you to map our issues IDs, such that it does not create whole new issues. However, the way JIRA works with attachments and comments means that our comments and attachments are duplicated.

This is because JIRA just adds them to the "comment body" and "attachment body".
We need a way to selectively export from YouTrack. For example, only exporting any new information (e.g. new comments, new attachments, etc.

We are flexible with the solution. For example, the server could log the project slugs and date stamp and then filter issues that have been updated since then. YouTrack could have a custom field with options such as "Never Exported", "Exported", "Updates to Export", "Exported with Updated", etc.

### Conditional Logic for Information

We have some custom fields value that won’t be present on all exports. These are special values for certain projects.

We want the values of these to be exported *if* an issue has a certain custom field. The issues will otherwise have the same core custom fields.

But some issues may have one or two special ones. We want to add logic that checks for these
and adds them if / when it comes across them.

### Export Meta-data about the issue

We want to export information about the issue itself. Specifically, we want ot be able to log when an issue was raised.

### Bug Fix with attachments

We reference attachments on YouTrack in Markdown. YouTrack will do some legwork with attachments. Our export script currently does not. For example, if you upload "image.png” but reference "image.PNG", YouTrack will work it out.

The export tool does not work this out. A solution would be casting the files and references to lowercase.