Include project tags and/or custom fields in the extract

[nichollsdave]

At the moment project tags and custom fields are not exported.

A customer has requested that they be included in the Excel file to help sort their data. Different customers use tags or custom fields to help specify which department etc. It would help customers use the data in the Excel file if this data were included.

[nichollsdave]

Investigating this at the moment we load all projects via API and then the project version summaries for each project. We do not make any deeper calls to components/vulns etc as the number of API calls goes through the roof and also the sensitivity of this data goes up. Just keeping it at the summary level is a good balance.

For example if we have 1000 projects with 10 versions in each (forgetting pagination) the number of API calls is :
1 to load the projects
1000 (one for each project) to load the version summaries
= 1001 API calls.

If we were to load the tags and custom fields this would change to:
1 to load the projects
1000 (one for each project) to load the version summaries
1000 (one for each project) to load that project's tags
1000+ (one for each project) to load that project's custom fields
= 3001 API calls.

Therefore we need to be careful as this will result in longer run times and more load on the Black Duck server.

Not saying this should not be done but want to highlight the impact.