Redmine

I'm trying to replicate in Redmine the equivalent functionality of our existing defect management system, whereby when doing a release our build management script runs a query to pull down a list of all the included Issues & Descriptions to include in our release notes. That's easy in Redmine for plain text fields, but I don't see a simple way to to do that if the Description or Notes fields contain markdown or even macros.

Best I can see, the REST API always returns the raw content - ie unexpanded macros and markdown content. The Atom feed from the Issues List will pull down the formatted / expanded / rendered Description field, but no Notes. Whereas the Atom feed for the single Issue itself will pull down the Atom feed for the Notes in rendered form, but it won't contain the Description!

It should also be noted that the Atom feeds also only contain a subset of the Issue's fields. So the only way I can come up with to (in the extreme case) download all info about a set of Issues with the appropriate field formatting is:

1. Use the REST API to query for the required issues
2. For each issue use the REST API to download the Issue detail with Journal entries - ie all the Issue's fields
3. For each issue, get the formatted form of the Issue Description from the Issue List Atom Feed
4. For each issue get the formatted form of the Notes / Journal fields from the Issue detail Atom feed.

That's a lot of work and overhead! It seems like a somewhat fundamental requirement, so am I missing an easier approach?!