Greetings to all,

I thought I would do an initial post here to initiate conversation on Importing large amounts of data into Contour and the pitfalls we uncovered. We are migrating from No Real Traceability to Contour and we are in an blended agile environment. We have several hundred User Stories, Use Cases, Business Rules and other documentation that needs to be moved to Contour. All of these are in MS Word and we wanted to put them into Contour - but not as attachments. We wanted to convert the Word to HTML and stuff it in the Description part of an Reference-type group item (at the time, we did not know how to create our own artifact). Not that it would matter. The whole point here is how to convert over 3000 Word docs to HTML and stuff the HTML into the the Rich Text Editor part of the Contour item.

This task screams for VBA macros, doesn't it? It did and that's what we did. We wrote a medium to complex macro to open the files, save as HTML, read the file in as a text file then store the entire file as a string to an Excel cell. The macro then would convert the file to a CSV file in order to be ready for importing. It took a while to get this working, primarily because the author did not have a ton of expertise in VBA but got the job accomplished. We were seeing a couple of oddities such as graphics (of course) did not import right away and we decided at the time, that if the User Story was revisited, we would bring the graphics over at that time.

I am interested to know if anyone has done simliar work and, more important, in a dual environment (which we have until we completely cutover to Contour), how you keep up with artifact changes. We use CVS for our versioning. I wanted to do something with CruiseControl but did not have the expertise to do a deep dive nor the time to learn. We ended up doing this manually (and are still doing so).

Good luck with your work!