Somebody asked me a simple question the other day: “how do I export all of my work items at once”. I suspected they were looking to perform a backup, but it sounded like they might want to import into another system or just archive them in some readable way. I suggested Microsoft Excel, but it can only fetch work items from one team project at a time. So repetition, using a Macro or a human, would be required.
Here’s an alternative we came up with …
1. Downloaded and installed Team Foundation Power Tools.
2. Picked one of the Team Projects, added a query, and removed the Team Project = @Project clause, so that it was completely empty:
3. Changed the Column Options, added the columns we wanted to export. For testing, we selected ID, Team Project, Work Item Type, and Title.
4. Ran the query and verified that it pulled the right work items and fields we wanted.
5. Saved the query (My query) and named it AllProjectWorkItems.
6. Dropped to the command prompt and executed the following commands:
cd c:Program FilesMicrosoft Team Foundation Server 2008 Power Tools
tfpt query “CalculatorMy QueriesAllProjectWorkItems” /Server:vsts /format:xml > c:AllWorkItems.xml
7. This command generated an XML file containing all of the fields from all work items from all projects. This satisfied their requirement.
At this point you can update the query adding more columns, until you have the superset of what you need for the export of all types from all projects. With a little finesse, the XML document could be migrated into Excel or another software application.