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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.

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.

Related topics. Links between issues are not written.

Document references. Links to external documents are not written.

Board order. The order you dragged cards into inside a column is a priority signal that lives only in your browser. It is not part of the BCF format, it is not in the file, and the receiving tool has no way to see it. If the order matters to somebody else, put it in the Priority field, which does travel. See Board view and grouping.

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.