How can I create a report containing descriptions of scenario work items of some given Team project?

The single work items table containing Team Project ID I could find is "Work Item History" from TfsWarehouse and the single table containing descriptions I could find is WorkItemLongTexts from TfsWorkItemTracking.

But it is impossible to create a report based on two Datasources, isn't it? I have a feeling I miss some very easy possibility. Because getting descriptions of the project's scenario work items (for example to send them to the customer as pdf) is THE typical use case for scenario work items... It can't be so hard...

Some pre-made Excel-Based reports like "Scenarios.xls" can get any column of workitems (it is even configurable). How do they do it? Do they really access several datasources and combine the data on the client?

Hi there,

You can create a report with more than one data source. When you create a new dataset you specify the data source.

Tutorials on creating reports using reporting services: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms170246.aspx

this msdn magazine article is a good overview: http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/06/06/DataPoints/default.aspx

In case you have very specific RS questions, you can post them in the Reporting Services forum: http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowForum.aspx?ForumID=82&SiteID=1

hope that helps!

OK, I'll try to read more about reporting services, but I still have questions.

All tutorials about VSTS Reporting I've seen are using the TfsWarehouse database only. But this database has a very limited number of tables to create useful reports (at least for me). Does Microsoft recommend to use other databases (for example TfsWorkItemTracking) for custom reports? Where can I get a documentation about their data schema (not every table in this database is self explaining)?

Thanks.

mrfridental:

I have asked the same thing and the response was that querying the operational datastores directoy (and tfsworkitemtracking is operationa), is not recommemded.

Msft recommends using .net objects representing the data stores instead of direct access