As the end of financial year is coming close here in Australia I was asked by my manger to send him these cost estimates for the last financial year. Trying to do it manually one by one from the Web UI for a couple of them made me think that there must be a better way to accomplish that. Google search did bring a few results but they were relevant to on premisses hosted JIRA solution where you had access to the command line.  These didn’t suit me. So after playing around a little I came up with the solution described below. If you have a Linux machine (and a know how) you could probably achieve that in a couple of lines but I only had access to my Windows machine at that time . In addition to a Windows machine  you will need  Notepad++.

Export JIRA backup

• In the JIRA OnDemand interface navigate to JIRA Administration > System
  
• Under the Import and Export click Backup manager
  
• On the Backup manager page verify that Back up attachments is checked and click Create Backup
  
• Once the backup is done a link to download the backup archive will be visible.
• Download the file and unzip it to a temporary folder (I’ve used C:\Temp).

Extracting attachments’ file names

• Open the  C:\Temp\JIRA-backup-20140605\entities.xml  with Notepad++
• Search the file for all the lines that have following text: FileAttachment
• 
• The result will be shown in the “Find result” pane
• 
• Open a new file in Notepad++ and copy all the content from “Find result” pane
• Run the following replace:
  .+id=”(\d+)”.+filename=(“.+?”).+
  ren \1 \2
• 
• As a result you will have somthing simmilar to the below:
• 
• Remove all the lines that don’t start with “ren”

Copy files from all subfolders to a single folder

• The attachments are located in the <BACKUP_ARCHIVE_FILE>\data\attachments folder (in our case it’s C:\temp\JIRA-backup-20140605\data\attachments)
• Open a command prompt:
• Change current directory to the attachments one
  cd C:\temp\JIRA-backup-20140605\data\attachments
  Note: if you are interested only in attachments from a specific project then type cd C:\temp\JIRA-backup-20140605\data\attachments\<PROJECT_NAME> instead of the above.
• Create an output folder (if you are interested only in attachments from a specific project
  md c:\temp\JIraAttachments\
• Copy files form all the projects into the output folder
  for /R %b in (.) do @copy %b\*.* c:\temp\JIraAttachments\
• Change the current directory to the output directory
  cd c:\Temp\JIraAttchments
• Rename the files (just copy and paste the content of the text file from Notepad++
  ren 10601 “Cost Estimation 1.xlsx”
  ren 10303 “ALM Cost Calculator.xlsx”
  ren 10304 “App Instrumentation – BPE.pptx”
  ren 10604 “BPE Approval.msg”
  ………….
• The result is that you have all the attachments in one folder. By the way the attributes (like Date Modified) are kept
  

The post How to export attachments from JIRA OnDemand and JIRA Cloud appeared first on ISbyR.