I need help with automating JIRA data export for custom reporting
I want to create an automated workflow that pulls ticket data from our JIRA system and converts it into formatted reports using Excel/VBA. The goal is to have a standalone application (maybe Python, Java, or .NET) that can connect to JIRA, fetch specific tickets based on search criteria, then automatically trigger Excel processing to generate custom reports.
Currently using JIRA version 3.13 and wondering what’s the best approach for this kind of external integration. I checked some Atlassian marketplace apps but those seem to be internal add-ons rather than external automation tools.
Has anyone successfully built something similar? What APIs or methods work best for pulling JIRA data programmatically from outside the system?
We did something similar at my company with Java and the Atlassian REST API client. Main thing - use API tokens for auth, not username/password. We went with Apache POI for Excel generation instead of triggering actual Excel processes. Way simpler for deployment since you don’t need Excel installed on the server. Performance was solid - handled about 10k tickets per batch. Watch out for JIRA Cloud’s rate limiting though. We had to add throttling to our requests. Atlassian’s REST API docs are pretty comprehensive, but optimizing JQL queries took some trial and error to get decent response times.
Built a .NET solution for this exact thing about two years ago. JIRA REST API v3 works great, but authentication’s a pain depending on your setup. We went with basic auth using API tokens for cloud instances. Learned this the hard way - batch your requests and add solid error handling. JIRA loves returning partial data without telling you something went wrong. For Excel, skip VBA automation and use EPPlus instead. No need to have Excel installed, and it’s way faster with large datasets. If you’re running the same reports often, throw in some caching too.
i did something similar using python as well! the jira rest api is pretty solid. i use requests to grab the data and then openpyxl for the excel stuff. just be careful with auth issues - make sure your api tokens are good!