TFS 2017 Copy work item does not copy attachments

0
votes

I'm copying work items from one TeamProject to another in TFS 2017 On-Premise. We do this through the "Create Copy of work item..." action on the TFS webportal. Everything copies fine (Title, Description, Priority,..) except the attachments. It appears that copied work items do not get a copy of the attachments of the original work item. There isn't even a reference to the original attachment.

We have customer projects where customers can create their tickets with attachments and we copy those to our internal team project to completely seperate the external from internas. All the other values are copied, links get generated but attachments are ignored.

Is there a way to force TFS to copy the attachments too? We do not want to navigate between the two work items, just to check if there are attachments included in the original one.

Checked:

  • With admin users on both team projects
  • Copying the ticket to the same team project (same Area/Iteration too)
  • check flag "Include existing links" in the copy dialog
1
tfsattachmenttfs-workitem
Why not give your customers access to the team project but restrict them from everything except a specific Area where they can create work items as appropriate? That solves the problem without jumping through all of these hoops. - Daniel Mann
Because we want the customer to only create an abstract, very simple WIT "Ticket" and the decision which WIT (Bug, Task,..) it should be internaly is made by us. Therefore we always need to copy from Ticket to eg. Task, even if we would put everything in the same team project. - phifi

1 Answers

2
votes

It's by designed, no this built-in feature for now. Check this:

Copy a work item when you want to create another instance of it and optionally change its work item type. This action opens a form with all fields filled out except for the Title. A related link to the original work item is created. Also any parent link is copied over. No history or attachments are copied over from the original work item.

Source Link: Copy or clone a work item

As a workaround: Either use TFS API to copy the work item including download/readd the attachment or a more easier way as Daniel suggested using permission to restrict your customers for just creating work items in a specific area.

Update: Add some related link for your reference: