Hello all!

When creating a new bug in Team Explorer, you have an Area: field that holds a nice dropdown that includes a look-a-like treeview. I believe the type is called "TreePath". Anyway...I'm currently creating a winform application and would like to re-create this Area dropdown.

For example purposes, when creating a bug in VSTS, the Area field looks like this:
Vince Test Project
-item 1
-item 2
-item 3

So far I've manage to do the following inside my winform application:

NOTE: _store.Projects[9]...project 9 is the ID of the project I'm interested in. Its hardcoded for now

Begin form_load
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
_store = (WorkItemStore)_currentTFS.GetService(typeof(WorkItemStore));
WorkItemTypeCollection workItemTypes = _store.Projects[9].WorkItemTypes;
WorkItemType wit = workItemTypes["Sprint Backlog Item"];
WorkItem wi = new WorkItem(wit);

Vince, as you mentioned, there are two parts to this:

- Building dropdown tree control: Doing this is much simpler with VS2005 because of new controls that can make showing any control as dropdown of combobox easy with just few lines of code. I don't remember the links for that right now but you might able to find it in search - let me know if you cannot find it. Alternatively you can use older winforms features to build one and an example library is here: http://www.codeproject.com/cs/miscctrl/customcombos.asp?df=100&forumid=15223&exp=0&select=1493352 . After building it, you can use custom control features in SP1 beta to implement IWorkItemControl and host it in work item form.

- Getting tree data: Allowed values won't have the values because it is of tree data structure. You can read it from AreaRootNodes and IterationRootNotes properties of a project object (in your example _store.Projects[9] object). Each Node object has children collection that you can traverse through recursively and add those values to tree control you build above.

Thank you Naren!

I've looked at the example (link) you gave me and this looks fairly complicated as oppose to your other suggestion, to "make showing any control as dropdown...with just a few lines of code". I'd be interested in seing an example using .NET 2.0.

I'm not sure I fully understand, is a TreeView control that you turn into a combobox **or** is it a combobox that holds a treeview?

Meanwhile, I did manage to loop trhough the AreaRootNodes and fill-in a regular combobox for now...

I have to admit, googling a bit I did found examples in VS 2003 and converted them into a VS 2005 project only to realize that people are really tweeking things. If there's no other/simpler way to do it, then I'll use one of the custom control.

If on the other hand, you could provide me an example of this "making showing any control as dropdown...with just a few lines of code" then perhaps I'd understand better.

Unfortunatelly, looking at the TreeView control and combobox, didn't manage to find the magical property "Turn into dropdown" hehehe...too bad I guess

Thanks again for the help Naren!
Sincerely

Vince