We are introducing some changes to ticket export capabilities in Zendesk Support on July 21, 2021. This article explains what the new limits are and how exported files are affected.
This announcement includes these sections:
Summary
Starting July 21, 2021, ticket exporting capabilities in Admin > Manage > Reports will have a new limit of 1MB per ticket. This will primarily affect JSON exporting functionality.
When a ticket exceeds 1MB, comments will be removed from the ticket in the export file. In addition, a new JSON error file will be included in the downloaded ZIP folder that contains a list of tickets that have encountered these errors, so they can be retrieved separately, if desired. You can use the Ticket Comments API to retrieve the remaining comments.
For information, see Exporting data to a JSON, CSV, or XML file.
What is affected?
In Support, admins can export ticket sets based on dates.
When you export tickets to a JSON file, you get a list of tickets and their associated comments (CSV and XML exports don’t include comments). Ticket comments are the largest data attribute of the ticket. With the new limit of 1MB per ticket, we cannot guarantee to get all data to stay within that limit. So, when the 1MB limit is passed, then we will not include the comments in the ticket.
What to do
When the JSON file is downloaded and the comments are removed from the ticket, the JSON file will include an error message on tickets where comments were removed. These errors will be in the JSON file along with all the other tickets that do include comments. For example, here is the error message:
'ticket': {
'id': 122212121212,
'comments': [{
'error': 'MaximumCommentsSizeExceeded',
'details': "We didn't include the comments because they are bigger than the allowable size of the Export Service. You can fetch the info by querying the tickets API passing 'ticket_id: #{ticket_nice_id}' as a parameter. Details here: https://developer.zendesk.com/rest_api/docs/core/ticket_comments#list-comments"
}],
...
}
There will also be a new file included in the ZIP folder that only has the tickets with error messages. The error will look the same as above, but that JSON file will only include all the tickets with the errors. This makes it easier to know which tickets had errors in them without scrolling through all tickets to pull ticket comments for the tickets with errors.
In order to retrieve any comments of tickets with errors, get the list of ticket IDs from the error file and use the Ticket Comment API. This will allow you to get the remaining comments that were too large to be included in the original JSON file.
4 Comments
Hello,
If the limitation ultimately concerns CSV files, we will urgently need a solution because we cannot put date conditions on CSV exports, so we are forced to export all data! CSV export is already 7Mo and will have doubled by the end of the year, when we will reach 100,000 tickets. And we must have our data via this CSV export! The other formats cannot be used for us.
Thanks.
Same as Anne, who thinks it's a good idea to not allow date conditions?
Agreed - this is a huge issue - this is the only way I can pull data to create the necessary reporting required by our clients. Need a resolution ASAP.
Hello, thanks for reaching out. I would like to answer a few of these concerns.
I first want to make it clear that the limit is per ticket and not the entire export itself. Each individual ticket in the export cannot exceed 1MB, and this typically only happens because of a large thread of comments or large comments. This is why it will only really affect the JSON exports that does include comments.
The CSV format does technically also have a 1MB limit per ticket BUT since comments are not included in the ticket export then it shouldn't be affected. Based on our look at previous exports we haven't seen any CSV exports that have passed this limit and don't expect anyone to do it but for completeness we did want to point out that the limit does exist.
The reason we are had to put this limit in place is because we had an EOL in one of the underlying technologies used. We had a trade-off analysis and the one we chose had this as a limitation.
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