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What travels, and what does not

Better read here than discovered by the person you sent the file to.

What goes in the file​

  • The issue itself: title, description, status, type, priority, assignee, dates, labels and milestone.
  • Comments, if you left Comments ticked - including the automatic change-log entries, since those are stored as comments.
  • Screenshots, if you left Viewpoint images ticked. Both the images attached to comments and the ones that came in on a viewpoint from another tool. The camera position travels with them, so a viewpoint opens in the receiving tool looking at the right thing.
  • Links between issues, if you left Related-topic links ticked.
  • Document references, if you left Document references ticked. The referenced documents are bundled into the file.

The last three are all ticked unless you untick them.

What does not​

BCF 3.0. The file is written as BCF 2.1. There is no 3.0 export. The app reads both, so this only bites when somebody specifically asks for a 3.0 file.

Board order. The place a card sits in its column is stored on the issue here, and is readable by the API and by an AI assistant - but it is this app's own field, not part of the BCF standard, so it is not in the file and the receiving tool cannot see it. If the order matters to them, put it in the Priority field, which does travel. See Board view and grouping.

Custom ordering. Same reason: our field, not a BCF one.

What the other end may do with it​

A BCF file carries your project's own vocabulary. If your project has a status called Awaiting client or a type called Facade, those strings go into the file as they are - and the receiving tool has never heard of them.

Well-behaved tools keep the value and show it. Others fall back to something generic, or drop the issue into an "unknown" bucket. You cannot control that from here, so if the exchange matters, agree the vocabulary with the other party before you start rather than after the first file.

The reverse is also true, and friendlier: when you import a file carrying values your project has never seen, those values are added to your project options rather than thrown away.

If in doubt, look at the file​

A .bcf file is a zip archive. Rename it to .zip and open it, and you can see exactly what was written - one folder per topic, each with its markup and its viewpoint images. It is a quick way to settle an argument about whether something made it into the file.