Using TFS Kanban Column State to the Warehouse

• Download source

Introduction

For a while, I have been wondering and querying if it is possible to see or use the customizable Kanban columns in the warehouse for reporting purposes. The answer many times comes up as no. Having done a lot of customization of TFS lately, I decided to take a stab at it.

Below is my solution for getting the Kanban column state into the warehouse.

Customize

First, you’ll need to add a custom field to a Work Item Type, in a previous post Getting Html Fields Data into your TFS Warehouse, I show how to add a new field. For this example, we will add a new field that matches the images below:

Note: There will be no reason to add this field to the layout.

Build

Next, we will create a new Subscriber. Create a new Class Library and add a reference to Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Framework.Server.dll, v11.0.0.0 – This assembly can be found in the project files attached but also in the directory C:\Program Files\Microsoft Team Foundation Server 11.0\Tools on the TFS server.

The function of interest for this post is the PopulateKanBanColumnField, this method is shown below but you can grab the project code and see the full implementation.

private bool PopulateKanBanColumnField(WorkItem wiCurrent)
{
    bool result = false;

    if (wiCurrent.Fields.Contains("KanBan State") && 
       wiCurrent.Fields["Work Item Type"].Value.ToString() == "User Story")
    {
        foreach (Field field in wiCurrent.Fields)
        {
            if (field.Name.ToLower().EndsWith(".kanban.column") 
            && this.IsGUID(field.Name.Remove(field.Name.ToLower().IndexOf(".kanban.column"))) 
            && wiCurrent.Fields["KanBan State"].Value != field.Value)
            {
                wiCurrent.Fields["KanBan State"].Value = field.Value;
                result = true;
            }
        }
    }

    return result;
}

Deploy

Now compile this and copy the output assemblies to C:\Program Files\Microsoft Team Foundation Server 11.0\Application Tier\Web Services\bin\Plugins on the TFS server.

Warning

1. Every time you move a work item that this subscriber effects, it will save 2 revisions to the system, i.e.: when moving from Backlog to In progress, it will save the work item and then the rule will fire, find that work item in the store and then update the field.
2. I have only tested that this works with TFS 2012 Update 2.

Enjoy

Hope this helps and allows for more people to use the Kanban columns in their teams because they can now report on it .