The last version of Project Configurator featured some improvements oriented to the export and import of large configurations.

Our idea of a large configuration is one that creates a XML file with size greater than 5 or 10 MB when exported. These configurations create some unique challenges and version 1.6 of Project Configurator provides JIRA admins with better tools to tackle them.

To start with, if you are going to export a very large number of configuration objects, the plugin could detect some errors in the configuration (like missing references) that would halt the export. In plugin versions earlier than 1.6, the export would stop when the first error was detected. Then you would have to fix it and retry the export. Another error could be found, which would require again fixing it and retrying the export. In a large configuration, it would not be very rare to find a number of errors which would lead you to the same number of export-analysis-fix iterations. Version 1.6 has changed that behaviour as it now tries to go over all the configuration objects to be exported and report all errors found in one pass. This way you would be able to fix all of them at the same time, instead of being caught in iterations of fixing one error and retrying the export. This improvement is filed as PCP-290.

As another improvement when exporting, PCP-269 has solved a problem that affected admins that wanted to exclude from the export custom fields not used by the exported projects, when there were many custom fields in the instance. Additionally, we expect this fix will also improve export times in these cases.

On the import side, the most relevant improvement is the new option to skip import of configurations at the project level (you can find it in the issue tracker as PCP-281). This new option opens the door to many ways of splitting a large configuration into several smaller imports. Before version 1.6 this was difficult and cumbersome to do. You tried to exclude some object type from the import and it was necessary for another object type. You excluded that one too…but eventually this chain of exclusions reached the projects whose configuration could not be skipped. Version 1.6 allows you to do exactly that: create new projects (if they do not exist yet) with a default configuration and postpone setting them up with their schemes. Have a look at this documentation page for more ideas on how to split a large import.

Last but not least, remember that JIRA sets a default limit on the size of uploaded files of 10 MB. This means that if your XML configuration file is larger than that, you have to increase that limit before importing it. You can find more details about the impact of this limit at the issues PCP-213 and PCP-220 and this page explains how to increase it.