Hey everyone,
I need some help with a project I’m working on. I’m trying to set up an automated system that pulls issues from our JIRA database (we’re running version 3.13) and converts them into a report without using JIRA directly. My plan is to run a program in a language like Java, VB, or C# to search for and download these issues, then use VBA to process the data and format the report.
Has anyone achieved something similar? I reviewed some JIRA and Atlassian plugins, but they seem to be designed for use within JIRA. I’d appreciate any tips or alternative approaches you might suggest. Thanks a lot for your help!
hey, i’ve used python with jira’s rest api before. it’s awsome and grabs data via pandas. be wary of rate limits if scraping loads, and logging errors is crucial. good luck!
Having worked with JIRA extensively, I can recommend using the JIRA REST API for your project. It’s quite versatile and can be accessed from various programming languages. Given your familiarity with Java, VB, or C#, you could leverage any of these to interact with the API.
For data extraction, you’d want to construct appropriate JQL queries to fetch the relevant issues. Once retrieved, you can process this data locally to generate your custom reports. Consider using libraries like Apache POI for Java or EPPlus for C# to create Excel reports if that’s your preferred output format.
One key aspect to keep in mind is error handling and logging. JIRA’s API can sometimes be finicky, especially with large data sets, so robust error management is crucial. Also, if you’re dealing with a significant volume of issues, implement pagination in your requests to avoid timeouts.
Lastly, for scheduling, you could set up a Windows Task Scheduler or a cron job to run your program periodically, ensuring your reports are always up-to-date.
I’ve actually tackled a similar challenge in my previous role. We ended up using Python with JIRA’s REST API, which worked wonders for us. The ‘jira’ library in Python made it surprisingly straightforward to connect to our JIRA instance and pull the data we needed.
We set up a script that ran on a schedule, fetching issues based on specific JQL queries. The data was then processed and formatted into a custom report using pandas for data manipulation and matplotlib for some basic charts. We output everything to an Excel file, which was then automatically emailed to stakeholders.
One tip: pay attention to rate limiting if you’re dealing with a large volume of issues. We had to implement some clever pagination and delay logic to avoid hitting API limits.
Also, don’t underestimate the importance of error handling and logging. It saved us countless headaches when troubleshooting issues with our automated reports.
If you’re comfortable with Python, I’d highly recommend this approach. It gives you a lot of flexibility and control over the entire process.