Discussions GraphQL API: how to add or include attachments?

[franke-biosaxs]

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Hi all.

I was tasked with migrating an old phpBB forum to Discussions on GitHub to preserve the content for future lookup. There are about 2000 topics and 7000 posts to consider. I've already obtained the mysql dump from the backend database from remote server and imported it to sqlite for easy local queries.

The GitHub GraphQL documentation describes how to create topics and how to add comments to discussions. However, there are also a few hundred attachments, mostly stuff like screenshots etc, that would need to be preserved as well. These attachments currently also reside on local storage. From what I understand from only reading the docs, there seems to be no immediate way to attach/include local files in comments?

Any pointers on how to achieve this?

Thanks!

[LiteBrite82]

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[franke-biosaxs]

Thanks for the reply. Now I am confused. Each time (ok, twice) I opened an actual support ticket, I was (sort of) redirected to come here to ask my question. This time I tried here first, in hope that someone might know the answer to this. I would have thought the use case to be reasonably common. Anyone who wants to automate discussion submission likely also wants to attach something at some point. Or so I thought.

Any pointers of where else to go/ask/look? We do have a Teams subscription if that would help? Thanks & regards. Daniel

[LiteBrite82]

@franke-biosaxs
You are in one of the multiple right places. Community discussions is primarily intended to be used by community members to help each other grow, make connections, share experiences, and find solutions.

Your documentation is fantastic! and your google-fu is strong!

The discussions you linked are a little dated - I'm gonna keep this discussion open for a while to see if any community members have found a solution in the last year.

We are always working to make GitHub as awesome as possible. We can't guarantee that every bit of feedback sees action, but we are paying attention.

[franke-biosaxs]

I activated my google-fu and found a couple of bits of information on this:

• the interactive/manual Issue and Discussion entry allows for attachments - d'oh
• I am by no means the first to ask for this feature
• consensus seems to be: this feature is not implemented/made-public in the API on purpose

I checked: for my task there are a total of 1113 attachments to take care of. I can see the following options:

1. drop all attachments and only import the text messages
2. upload manually through the interactive upload in each of the corresponding discussions
3. create an orphaned branch in the corresponding repository, commit all files there and inject the links to them into the newly created discussions.

Option 1. renders the whole procedure mostly useless, option 2. is only for masochists. Which likely means option 3.

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