The tree structure of epics and features in TFS has been lost after publish from Excel Add in

Question

I use excel for reporting from TFS, but one day after publishing, the structure of epics and features was destroyed and now all user stories belong to an incorrect feature, resulting in a mess. I think the problem was that I ordered the list before I publish it.

I have tried to publish all again from a correct excel file backup, but this did not work the parents are not corrected.

Any help will be very appreciated

Answer 1

There is no easy way to fix this. When a tree structure is sorted in Excel, all work items will be re-linked to their new parent based on their indentation.

To undo, you have a few options:

• Restore the Team Foundation Server Project Collection from backup. This will revert EVERYTHING (sources, builds, tests, work items etc) to the point in time of the backup.
• Restore the Team Foundation Server from backup to a new instance. Extract the original parent/child tree structure in Excel, push the correct structure to the production TFS server.
• With the original Excel file, you could try copying the data from it into the current (messed up) excel file and publish that again.
• Use a PowerShell or C# based automation to iterate through each work item's history (revision), find the revision that was created at the time you made the update and relink the item to the correct parent based on the historical data. See:
  • https://oshamrai.wordpress.com/2018/09/11/vsts-rest-api-2-get-work-items/
  • https://oshamrai.wordpress.com/2018/12/21/azure-devops-services-rest-api-7-add-and-edit-work-item-links/

You can use the Team Foundation Server Client Object Model to access the Work Item data stores.