Disabling Workflow transitions while importing TFS 2010 Workitems through excel

Question

I've written a custom Work Item Type, Which has its own workflow transition. This custom WIT reflects a defect type from a legacy system. The premise is to export the defects from the legacy system into an excel sheet, merge it with a TFS-Query based excel sheet and import (publish) the same into TFS 2010.

This approach seems to work, provided all the WI have their STATE as PROPOSED. But when I try to import a WI directly into RESOLVED or CLOSED state, A Workflow exception is rightly raised.

Since i'am transitioning a count of 1400 WI from one live environment (legacy system) to another (TFS) and with each of these WI in different STATES, I need a simple import without the restrictions of the Workflow.

If you have faced this issue before, Please advice what would be the best possible way to approach this problem.

Regards, Ben Salins

Answer 1

You could edit the WIT, add all possible transitions, import the WI's, then revert the WIT definition back to what it was before.

Answer 2

I can't think of a single step way to accomplish this, event though removing the transition rules temporarily seems like a reasonable solution, but I believe you don't want to do it.

What you can do is put all your 1400 work items into the Excel file and import them all as proposed in the first place. Then filter out and remove the ones that should remain proposed and set the remaining ones as Active, then publish changes. Then filter out and remove the ones that should remain active and set the remaining ones as resolved and publish.

Since you have designed a custom work item type definition, state names and order might differ for your example but I believe I made my point.