TFS Webservice Documentation

Question

We use a lot of of python to do much of our deployment and would be handy to connect to our TFS server to get information on iteration paths, tickets etc. I can see the webservi

Answer 1

The web services are not documented by Microsoft as it is not an officially supported route to talk to TFS. The officially supported route is to use their .NET API.

In the case of your sort of application, the course of action I usually recommend is to create your own web service shim that lives on the TFS server (or another server) and uses their API to talk to the server but allows you to present the data in a nice way to your application.

Their object model simplifies the interactions a great deal (depending on what you want to do) and so it actually means less code over-all - but better tested and testable code and also you can work around things such as the NTLM auth used by the TFS web services.

Hope that helps,

Martin.

Answer 2

So, this question is friggin' old, but let me take a whack at it (since it keeps coming up in my google searches).

There's no officiall supported API for the on premise TFS (the MSFT hosted one has http://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/integrate/api/overview).

That said, you can always use Fiddler (http://www.telerik.com/fiddler) or something like it to inspect the calls that the web client for TFS is making to the server and do your magic to turn those into the scripts in python you want.

You'll need to run your python scripts under a service account that has TFS privs appropriate to what it is trying to do (read, update, confugure... whatever).

Since it sounds like you are just trying to read from TFS, this might be a really easy way for you to get what you want since an HTTP get to http://yourserver/tfs/yourcollection/yourproject/_workitems#id=yourworkitemid will hand you back (halfway) sane html payloads.

If you want lists of iterations or teams or whatever, then your service account needs to have the appropriate admin privileges and hit things like http://yourserver/tfs/yourcollection/yourproject/_admin/_iterations and use that response.