Work Items and Work Item Types Overview
Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team System delivers capabilities that help enterprise software development teams manage their work using items such as bugs, requirements, tasks, risks, and so on. These items are referred to generically as work items.
The work item is a fundamental object in Visual Studio Team System. Work items can be of different types. A work item type defines the data that is collected for a work item by using fields and field rules, how that data is presented to a user by using a form, and the workflow that work item undergoes by using a state-transition model.
In Visual Studio Team System, a team's work is organized around team projects. Work item types and their corresponding work items are organized under team projects. All this information is stored in a single Team Foundation Server. Therefore, a work item type is scoped to a team project and stored on a Team Foundation Server.
Multiple team projects can share the same definition of a work item type, and the name of the work item type can even be the same between projects, but over time, administrators of team projects can choose to independently change work item type definitions.
How to: Export a Work Item Type from an Existing Project
To customize work item types on an existing project, you can use the command-line tool witexport to export the work item type to an XML file. Then you can customize the work item type by editing the XML file and incorporate your changes back into your project using witimport. For more information about the command-line tools, see witexport or witimport.
Required Permissions
To perform this procedure you must be a member of the Team Foundation Valid Users group. For more information, see Team Foundation Server Permissions.
To use Team Foundation commands at the command prompt
· Click Start, click All Programs, point to Microsoft Visual Studio 2008, point to Visual Studio Tools, and then click Visual Studio 2008 Command Prompt.
Alternatively, you can run vsvars32 in the Visual Studio installation path; usually DriveLetter:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\Tools.
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You must have Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 installed to use the Visual Studio 2008 Command Prompt. |
To export a work item type
1. Open a Visual Studio command prompt.
2. At the command prompt, type the following, and then press ENTER:
witexport /f "File Path" /t "Team Foundation Server name" /p "Team Project name" /n "Work Item Type name"
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If you are running Windows Vista, you might not have access rights to certain folders. If you try to export the work item type to a location where you do not have access rights, the registry virtualization technology automatically redirects the exported file and saves it to the virtual store. For more information, see http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=92325 and http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=92323. To avoid this redirection, you can export the file to a location where you have access rights. |
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To see a list of available work item types on your Team Foundation Server, select the Team menu and click Add Work Item. |
This exports the work item type from the Team Foundation Server to an XML file in the location that you specified. The following is displayed when the export operation finishes:
Work item type export complete.
How to: Import a Work Item Type to an Existing Project
After you have exported a work item type using witexport and made changes to the XML file, you can import the work item type to your Team Foundation Server using the command-line tool witimport. For more information about the command-line tools, see witexport or witimport.
Required Permissions
To perform this procedure you must be a member of the Team Foundation Administrators group or a member of the Project Administrators group for the project. For more information, see Team Foundation Server Permissions.
To use Team Foundation commands at the command prompt
· Click Start, click All Programs, point to Microsoft Visual Studio 2008, point to Visual Studio Tools, and then click Visual Studio 2008 Command Prompt.
Alternatively, you can run vsvars32 in the Visual Studio installation path; usually DriveLetter:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\Tools.
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Note: |
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You must have Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 installed to use the Visual Studio 2008 Command Prompt. |
To import changes
1. Open a Visual Studio Command Prompt window.
2. Import the changed work item type into the Team Foundation Server. To do this, at a Visual Studio command prompt, type the following, and then press ENTER:
witimport /f "File Path" /t "Team Foundation Server name" /p "Team Project name"
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Note: |
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If you are running the Windows Vista operating system, you might not have access rights to certain folders. If you tried to save the work item type XML file to a location where you do not have access rights, the registry virtualization technology automatically redirected and saved the file to the virtual store. For more information, see http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=92325 and http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=92323. To avoid this redirection, you can save the file in a location where you have access rights. |
This imports the work item type into the Team Foundation Server. The following is displayed when the import operation finishes:
Work item type import complete.
3. Select Team Explorer, and then on the View menu, click Refresh to download the latest updates from the server.
These updates include the changes that you just imported. Wait several seconds until all the nodes are loaded. Nodes that are still loading display the word working.
4. Create a new work item using your modified work item type. To do this, right-click the Work Items node, point to Add Work Item, and then click the work item.
This work item is created from the work item type that you changed and imported.