TFS Work Item Customization using TFS Power Tool: Part 3

Customize “Assigned To” field to list users only from the team project.

Hi All,

In this post I will show you how we can customize “Assigned To” field of task work item to list members only from Team Project.

By default TFS work item “Assigned To” field displays all the users from Team Project Collection. Most of our customer came with the request that they want to list only the users from their team project so that it will be easy to select the users to assign any work item to them, here is the steps to achieve the same.

In this blog I am going to show how edit work item online/in the server, without exporting and modifying offline and importing back to TFS.

Open Visual Studio, and Click on TOOLS -> Process Editor-> Work Item Types-> Open WIT from server, to open the template online.

Now connect to the TFS and then to the Team Project under the Team Project Collection.  Here collection is Awesome Collection.

 Select work item type Task (can be any other work item type)

In the fields tab, double click on “Assigned To” field.

In the Field Definition window click on Rules tab. Here we can see that already there are two rules defined, ALLOWEXISITINGVAUE and VALIDUSER.

Since we want to list users only from the team project, I suggest you to make use of the team project group called “Project Valid Users”, since all users who are members of the team project will automatically become member of “Project Valid Users” group.

Now click on New and select rule named, ALLOWEDVALUES then click OK.

In the next window we can add new list by clicking New.

In the text box enter the value [project]\Project Valid Users then click OK.

Check the option Exclude Groups to eliminate groups from the list. This will exclude TFS groups from listing in the drop down. Then click OK.

Click OK again.

Now our template is ready to be saved. Save the changes by clicking on “Save” button or ctrl+S. Since we are editing template online, the changes are saved directly to TFS Server, changes will reflect in your Visual Studio/Team Explorer task work items after you Refresh the connection.

Thanks for reading this blog. Hope you enjoyed.