Generate Release notes with work items not associated to any Pull Requests.

[Imran109]

Hello, is there a way to get access to the work items of a project that belongs to a specific area and iteration path that are not necessarily associated to any Pull Requests. I tried looking out for this is samples and documentation but couldn't find any help.

What we tried (Since it says global list of work items, I assumed it would fetch every items in a project, but its just fetching the linked work items to the repo. And our use case is to get all the work items of a project on some filter(By type, area and iteration) in the same project)

# Global list of WI ({{workItems.length}})
              {{#forEach workItems}}
              {{#if isFirst}}## Associated Work Items (only shown if  WI) {{/if}}
              *  **{{this.id}}**  {{lookup this.fields 'System.Title'}}
                - **WIT** {{lookup this.fields 'System.WorkItemType'}} 
                - **Tags** {{lookup this.fields 'System.Tags'}}
              {{/forEach}}

[rfennell]

You have two options I think

Using If blocks

You would need to add {{#if blocks something like (I have not tested this but it should be close)

 # Global list of WI ({{workItems.length}})
{{#forEach workItems}}
{{#if (and (contains (lookup this.fields 'System.AreaPath') 'A path') (contains (lookup this.fields 'System.IterationPath') 'A IterationPath'))}}
    {{#if isFirst}}## Associated Work Items (only shown if  WI) {{/if}}
        *  **{{this.id}}**  {{lookup this.fields 'System.Title'}}
         - **WIT** {{lookup this.fields 'System.WorkItemType'}} 
         - **Tags** {{lookup this.fields 'System.Tags'}}
{{/if}}
{{/forEach}}

Write a custom extension

You could write some Javascript to write and enhanced filtering foreach. This sample does a filter loop, but would need some editing

[Imran109]

@rfennell Thanks for the response, as mentioned looks like this would only fetch the WIs linked to that repository or any PRs in that specific repository. We need to fetch all the items that are also not associated to any pull requests or repositories. Basically we need to access all the WIs of a project and make a filter on them.

[rfennell]

There is no current support for including WI that are not either

• Associated with a commit/changeset
• A PR
• A Builds (manually and automatically)
• Is a parent of one of the above

There is feature request #1037 that would maybe address your need, but no immediate plan to add that feature. Always happy to consider PRs

[rfennell]

Change of plan, I am activally working on #1037 should be done soon

[rfennell]

This feature is available in 3.71.x

There is a new parameter where you can provide the WHERE part of the WIQL. This should be edited to select the WI you require.

 - task: richardfennellBM.BM-VSTS-XplatGenerateReleaseNotes-DEV1.XplatGenerate-Release-Notes.XplatGenerateReleaseNotes@3
    inputs:
      wiqlWhereClause: '[System.TeamProject] = "GitHub" and [System.WorkItemType] = "Product Backlog Item"'

Note you cannot use @project, @currentiteration or @me, but @today is ok. To work out the WHERE clause I recommend using the WIQL Editor extension

The results of this WIQL will be available in a new independent template array queryWorkItems i.e. it is completely separate from all the other WI arrays.

# WIQL list of WI ({{queryWorkItems.length}})
{{#forEach queryWorkItems}}
   *  **{{this.id}}** {{lookup this.fields 'System.Title'}}
{{/forEach}}

[Imran109]

Thanks a lot for the quick response 😉. We are now using this feature in our project.

[Imran109]

Hey @rfennell , Any plans to include @currentiteration to work in where clause

[rfennell]

Sorry no, the @currentiteration macro is not supported by the REST API WQL call, if you try you get the following error because the API does not know what team and hence areapath that should be used

{"$id":"1","innerException":null,"message":"TF401347: Invalid tree name given for work item -1, field 'System.IterationPath'.","typeName":"Microsoft.TeamFoundation.WorkItemTracking.Server.WorkItemFieldInvalidTreeNameException, Microsoft.TeamFoundation.WorkItemTracking.Server, Version=14.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a","typeKey":"WorkItemFieldInvalidTreeNameException","errorCode":600171,"eventId":3200}