Importing Issues From CSV Files

The CSV Import supports the following functionality:

• Supports auto-creating users as part of import.
• Supports auto-creating categories as part of import.
• Supports custom field importing.
• Supports importing as new issues.
• Supports updating issues based on match id field

Following are some hints to take into consideration:

• Have a separate CSV file per project.
• Switch to the project before importing.
• If the goal to add issues for the rows from CSV rather than update issues, then make sure to map ID fields (if in CSV) to be ignored.
• Users that are auto-created will have random passwords, will be disabled, and will have email as username@localhost.
• For timestamp fields like issue submission and last update timestamps. We recommend using ISO 8601. However, any format accepted by the PHP method strtotime() would work. If an integer is provided as the value, then it will be treated as the number of seconds since Unix Epoch (January 1 1970 00:00:00 GMT).
• For multi-line fields '\n' will be converted to new lines.
• Each issue must be represented by one line in the csv file.
• It is recommended to import the file and verify that the data looks good. Start with a small sample of data, and once it works fine, import the whole data set.
• Clarify that enumeration fields like status and priority are matched as follows:
  • Based on English name
  • Based on name localized in user's language.
  • Based on matching the enumeration code (e.g. see status codes)
• If the description field is not imported, it will be set to the same value as the summary. This is necessary since description is a mandatory field.
• If the category field is not imported, it will be set to the default category.
• Category and enumeration matches are case insensitive.

Following are the steps to generate the CSV file from Excel:

• Open the Excel sheet
• Save as "CSV (Comma delimited)", don't use "CSV (MS-DOS)".

Following are the steps to import the CSV file into MantisHub:

• Go to "Manage" - "Manage Plugins"
• Click install next to "Mantis CSV Importer" plugin.
• Select the project to import the issues into.
• Select CSV with issues related to the above project with one row per issue. Use "\n" to represent new lines.
• Go to "Manage" - "Import CSV file"
• First wizard page - enable creation of categories and set the separator character.
• Second wizard page - allows mapping csv columns to MantisHub fields.

Each issue should be represented by one line (row) in the CSV file.