Jira Datacenter supports archiving of issues and projects since v8.1. By archiving issues, Jira will remove them from the indexes. The archived issues will still be accessible in read-only mode, however, they will not appear in Jira searches. This enhances Jira performance because it stores less data in the indexes.

As many of the Xray entities are normal Jira issue objects, archiving its issues has the same effect of archiving any other Jira issue type. Xray also extends this feature by archiving some of its data.

The goal of this page is to describe how Xray handles the archiving feature and some of the effects of it.

Archiving Test Executions

Archiving old Test Executions is a good use case for archiving Xray issues, especially if continuous integration processes are used. These can quickly create many Test Execution issues while importing new execution results into Xray on a daily basis. These issues are good candidates to be archived.

Archiving a Test Execution issue automatically archives its related Test Runs as well. Archiving Test Runs will not delete the Test Run information from database, they are just hidden from issue views, reports, gadgets and are no longer used for the calculation of the Test Run Status and Requirement Status. It is still possible to browse archived Test Runs and even navigate into the execution page to see the execution results.

Test Runs archived via Test Execution issue can be restored at any time by restoring the Test Execution issue.

Archiving Tests

Archiving a Test issue automatically archives its related Test Runs with the same effects described on the previous section. Additionally, archived Tests are no longer used for the calculation of the Requirement Status and are hidden from the Requirement Test Coverage analysis, Test Plan Overall Execution Status bar and any other kind of analysis involving these Tests.

Test Runs archived via Test issue can be restored at any time by restoring the Test issue.

Archiving Test Plans

Archived Test Plans are no longer used as scope for the Test Run Status and Requirement Status

Xray built-in reports and gadgets

Archived issues and test runs no longer appear on reports, gadgets ...

Xray Document Generator exports

Archived issues and test runs no longer appear on documents exported by docgen ...

Issue data tables sections

Whenever an issue is archived it is removed from the Lucene indexes and thus no longer appears on JQL search results. This has impact on some of the Xray issue data tables used to present the associations between issues.