How to copy a work item and its tasks

Question

I would like to make a copy of a work item and all of its task.

I\'m using this version of the product: 11.0.50727.1 I\'m using Scrum 2.0 template for the project

Answer 1

I see by the date this question is a little more than 2 years old. Excel would not create the parent links for me. Here is my Powershell solution:

if ( (Get-PSSnapin -Name Microsoft.TeamFoundation.PowerShell -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue) -eq $null )
{
     Add-PSSnapin Microsoft.TeamFoundation.PowerShell
}

[void][System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Client")
[void][System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Build.Client")
[void][System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Build.Common")
[void][System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("Microsoft.TeamFoundation.WorkItemTracking.Client")

# Connect to TFS and get Work Item Store.
$tfsCollectionUrl = "https://tfs.CORP.com/tfs/group"
$tfs = Get-TfsServer -name $tfsCollectionUrl
$ws = $tfs.GetService([type]"Microsoft.TeamFoundation.WorkItemTracking.Client.WorkItemStore")

$storyID = 15211    # ID of the story you want to copy.

$story = $ws.GetWorkItem($storyID)
Write-Host "Cloning User Story: " + $story.Title

#Clone User Story
$cloneStory = $story.Copy()
($story, $cloneStory )
$cloneStory.Title = "COPY : " + $story.Title

# cloneStory will not have links to all the tasks that were linked to the orginal story.
# cloneStory will have two links, one to the same "feature" that the orginal was linked to, and one to the story it was cloned from.
$cloneStory.Links

# cloneStory will have 0 for an ID, because it has not yet been saved.
$cloneStory.Id
#$cloneStory.Save()
# cloneStory will now have an ID.
$cloneStory.Id
$parentID = $cloneStory.Id  # Parent ID will be used to link new cloned tasks to this story.

$links = $story.Links

# Define a Link Type to be used in the loop.
$linkType = $ws.WorkItemLinkTypes[[Microsoft.TeamFoundation.WorkItemTracking.Client.CoreLinkTypeReferenceNames]::Hierarchy]


foreach ( $link in $links )
{

    $itemID = $link.RelatedWorkItemId
    #$itemID

    $item = $ws.GetWorkItem($itemID)

    if ( ($item.Type).Name -eq "Task" )
    {
        $reportLine = "Cloning Task ID:{0} {1}" -f $itemId, $item.Title
        Write-Host $reportLine
        # Clone the Task
        # Create the Parent Link object
        # Add the Parent Link to Cloned Task
        # Save New Cloned Task

        $cloneTask = $item.Copy()
        $cloneTask.Title = "COPY : " + $item.Title
        $parentLink = new-object Microsoft.TeamFoundation.WorkItemTracking.Client.WorkItemLink($linkType.ReverseEnd, $parentID)
        $cloneTask.WorkItemLinks.Add($parentLink)
        $cloneTask.save()
        $cloneTask
    }
    else
    {
        $reportLine = "Skipping: {0} is not a Task, it is a {1}" -f $item.Title, ($item.Type).Name
        Write-Host $reportLine
    }
}

Answer 2

Have you tried Excel? It's your best friend when doing mass editing of work items. You can copy/paste a number of work items. by selecting all columns except the ID column. Copy them and then paste them at the bottom of the open query in Excel.

You need to ensure you're using a Tree based query and that all the columns you want to duplicate are part of the queries columns.

You might lose formatting of HTML typed fields this way though.

I'd be interested to know why you'd want to bulk copy Product Backlog items with all their tasks, from a scrum perspective I don't really see how it would make sense.