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Incorrect results view due to COPY rule

I have defined an additional field "MyState" with possible values "Open" and "Closed".
The System.State field has many more states.
The value of MyState is defined using the COPY rule
<WHEN field="System.State" value="Documented">
<COPY from="value" value="Open" />
</WHEN>
However some work items have a combination that is in fact no longer valid because they were imported using OM from the previous tracking system.
(E.g.: Documented with System.State set to "Closed")
When i look at these items in a result view then the System.State column shows the state "Open", which is not the actual state, but the state generated by the COPY rule.
However when I select the item, System.State changes to "Closed", which is the actual and correct state.
Selecting another workitem, changes the state back to "Open".
This means the result view does not show the actual state but the state which will be set once you edit and save the workitem.
I must admit that the state definitions may be a bit awkward and I will change things eventually, but in any case the result view behavior seems incorrect to me and this is very annoying.
(This is not the first time the COPY rule gives me headache !)

paso

We're experiencing the same problem and this strange behaviour is very annoying. In our case we have System.AssignedTo field displayed in the read-only field control and Company.Developer field beeing modified. Also we have a COPY rule in the form of

</FIELD>

</TRANSITION>

The problem described above appears when user first changes state from Ready to Active, then changes Developer field (by selecting different user from combo) and then commits changes. When another person looks on this record in query results view he see the picture described in the previous post. When record selected new value of Developer field is displayed, when it is not selected in the AssignedTo field previous value is displayed. Also there is a problem with My Work Items query because such "strange" records is not displayed in the results even if they have AssignedTo value equal to @Me.

This issue is very serious and stopping us from deploying TFS in production use. We would like to contact PSS with this issue, but never done it and don't know what should we do in order to try to resolve this issue via PSS. Any help is appreciated.

Vladimir Bougay

To paso problem: What is happening is that COPY rule is getting fired/enforced when you bring up the work item form (either in result view or in work item view). As a result when MyState field is not set to "Open" when System.State field is set to "Documented", it is changing the value in MyState field to "Open" as rule is defined. This is currently by design (apparently it has issue associated with this design.) A better approach could be firing the rules when user starts editing the work item. I will report this issue to the WIT feature team.

The issue that Vladimir reported seems more like a bug to me because that rule is supposed to kick off only when state changes from 'Ready' to 'Active'. I will bring this into WIT team's attention.

Thanks,

Mohammad

Mohammad Iqubal - MSFT

reply 3