Import from a Jira dashboard
Exportelier can read a Jira dashboard and build a report from what it finds. You pick a dashboard, Exportelier tells you gadget by gadget what it understood, you fill in anything Jira did not hand over, and you get an ordinary editable report.
Two things are worth knowing before you start, because they shape everything else on this page.
Exportelier imports the dashboard's configuration — which filter, which field, which chart type — and rebuilds it from its own components. The result is not a screenshot, not a pixel-faithful copy, and not an embedded Jira page. Column widths, gadget chrome and exact spacing are not reproduced, because Jira's public API does not expose them.
Atlassian does not guarantee that a built-in gadget's settings are readable through a public API. When a setting is not readable, Exportelier asks you to choose it. It never guesses which filter or which field you meant.
What can be imported
| Jira gadget | Becomes | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Filter Results | Issue table | Keeps the gadget's selected columns and their order |
| Pie Chart | Category chart (pie) | Uses the gadget's statistic type |
| Work Item Statistics | Category chart (bar) | Uses the gadget's statistic type |
| Two Dimensional Filter Statistics | Matrix | Uses both axis fields |
| Created vs. Resolved Chart | Time-series chart | Keeps the gadget's reporting period and lookback — see the limits below |
| Sprint Burndown | — | Needs historical sprint data, which Exportelier does not ship yet |
| Anything else | — | Named and excluded, never silently dropped |
Every gadget on the dashboard gets exactly one status:
- Ready — recognized, and everything needed was readable.
- Needs repair — recognized, but you have to supply a missing setting.
- Available later — recognized, but the matching Exportelier component does not exist yet. Sprint Burndown is here.
- Unsupported — a third-party or unknown gadget. It is named for you, not hidden.
- Error — Jira would not let Exportelier read it, or what it read was contradictory. This one blocks the import until you fix it in Jira.
Recognition is by the gadget's technical identity, never by its title. Renaming a gadget in Jira, or translating your Jira into another language, does not change what Exportelier makes of it — and naming a custom gadget "Pie Chart" does not make it one.
What a Created vs. Resolved chart shows
An imported Created vs. Resolved chart counts the created and resolved dates of the work items its Saved Filter matches today. It does not reconstruct which work items the filter matched in the past.
That matters when the filter's membership has changed. If a work item was moved out of the project the filter covers, it disappears from every bucket in the chart — including buckets from before the move. Jira's own gadget behaves the same way for the same reason, but it is worth knowing before you compare two exports taken months apart.
Three further differences are possible, and each one is named in the report's completeness notice when it applies:
- Reporting period. Daily, weekly and monthly are reproduced exactly. Hourly becomes daily, and quarterly and yearly become monthly — the totals are unchanged, only the width of each bucket differs.
- The unresolved trend line. Jira can overlay a third line for open work items over time. Exportelier's chart shows the created and resolved series only.
- Lookback. A period longer than 366 days is shortened to 366 days.
Everything else — the filter, cumulative mode, the numbers themselves — carries across unchanged, and you can edit every one of these settings in the designer afterwards.
Importing
- Open Reports and choose Import from Jira dashboard.
- Pick a dashboard. Only dashboards Jira already shows you appear here — being an Exportelier site admin does not widen the list.
- Read the analysis. Every gadget is listed with its status.
- Repair what needs repairing. You choose a Saved Filter and the fields from the ordinary pickers; there is no raw JQL box, by design.
- Review completeness. Everything that will be left out is listed by name, and you must confirm the exclusions explicitly before the report can be created.
- Create the report. It opens in the normal designer, fully editable.
Anything still marked Needs repair or Error blocks creation. Exportelier would rather refuse than produce a report that quietly omits half a dashboard.
The completeness notice
Every imported report begins with a completeness notice — a real component in the document, not a hint in the UI. It names the source dashboard, when it was imported, how many of the dashboard's gadgets are included, and every gadget that is not, by title.
It is an information note when everything was imported and a warning when anything was left out. It appears in PDF, Word and Markdown alike.
While the report is still linked to its import, the notice is managed by Exportelier: you can move the rest of the layout around freely, but you cannot delete or rewrite the notice. If it is removed or altered anyway, the report will not export — a document claiming to represent a dashboard while silently missing part of it is worse than no document.
If you want a report without the notice, duplicate it. A duplicate is an ordinary report with no import behind it, and no managed notice.
Keeping up with the dashboard
The import is a snapshot of the dashboard's configuration. The data stays live: a report always reads its Saved Filters at export time, so the numbers are current even months after the import.
What does not update by itself is layout and configuration. If someone adds a gadget in Jira, or points one at a different filter, your report keeps working exactly as before until you say otherwise.
Open the report and use Check for changes. Exportelier re-reads the dashboard and classifies every gadget as added, removed, moved, configuration changed, or unchanged. Re-import then applies it:
- unchanged and moved gadgets keep what they have;
- anything you added to the report by hand is left alone;
- changed and added gadgets take fresh content;
- a gadget whose new configuration cannot be resolved automatically stops the re-import and goes to repair, rather than overwriting your work with a guess;
- a gadget that was excluded as "available later" and that a newer Exportelier release can now import appears as changed, and re-import adds it to the end of the report. Existing reports never gain a component just because a release shipped — you have to ask for it.
A template version is saved automatically before a re-import, so Restore version undoes it.
There is no scheduler and no background synchronization. Re-import happens when you ask for it.
Permissions
Importing, re-importing and deleting an import are site admin actions.
Every dashboard, gadget and filter read runs as the person performing the import — a site admin cannot import a dashboard Jira does not show them. Later exports re-read the report's filters as whoever exports it, so the import does not widen anyone's access to Jira data. See Permissions & roles.
Limits
| Limit | Value |
|---|---|
| Gadgets analysed per import | 12 |
| Gadgets offered for selection above that cap | 60 |
A dashboard with more than twelve gadgets is not truncated. You are asked to choose which gadgets to import, and the ones you leave out are named in the completeness notice like any other exclusion.
An imported report is an ordinary report and inherits every report limit — data sources, components, issues per source. See the limits reference.
About the Jira API this uses
Exportelier reads dashboards only through Atlassian's documented Jira Cloud dashboard REST API. It does not parse Jira web pages, read gadget iframes, take screenshots, or use undocumented endpoints.
One of those operations — Get gadgets, which lists a dashboard's gadgets — is marked Experimental by Atlassian. That means Atlassian may change it without the stability guarantees the rest of the API carries. If it changes in a way Exportelier does not recognize, dashboard import switches itself off and says so, rather than importing something it has misread. Your existing reports, templates and exports are unaffected when that happens.