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Custom Work Item Types and Sort Order

I would like to create a custom work item field that has its own sort order. This would be like an enumerated type, for example:

Low
Medium
High

Alphabetically, these show up sorted as Low, High, Medium. That's not really desirable. If the user sorts in ascending order you'd like it to retain Low, Medium, High sequence. In addition, in descending order you'd like it to sort as follows: High, Medium, Low. Aside from preceding these with "1 - ", "2 - ", "3 -" is there any other way to get these custom fields to sort correctly?

Thanks,
Kevin.

Kevinbe

I guess I should add that the sort order I'm referring to involves using Team Queries.

Kevinbe

There is no other way to do this since the list values are considered as strings

Thanks

Sagar

SDET Visual Studio Team Foundation

Sagar Sura

I guess there would then only be 3 possible workarounds (of which 2 are probably acceptable and only 1 of these may be possible):

1. Generate another calculated integer value field based on the string value work item field and sort by that.
2. OR, if that's not possible, then create another field that has an integer value that represents this string field.
3. OR, since 2 is really awful because you have to keep two fields in sync (so it really isn't an option) prepend a number to each of the text values.

Is 1 possible? It would seem that that is the best work around.

Thanks,
Kevin.

Kevinbe

As far as I know we cannot have enumerated values for list items. List Item's value is just a string and hence workaround '1' is not possible. I feel workaround '3' is best bet

Thanks

Sagar

SDET Visual Studio Team Foundation

Sagar Sura

OK, I will implement option 3 then. Hopefully the next version of TFS will have support for enumerated types (and hence better sorting capability).

Thanks,
Kevin.

Kevinbe

I'm looking for a way to change the default alphabetic sorting order. For some fields, I have defined special values, like "~ Unknown ~". These should be at the end of the drop-down list and not at the beginning as they are now. Windows Explorer is sorting the same way, but good-old 'dir' sorts differently and puts all files that start with a character that have a higher ascii code than Z at the end.

For example: ~test.txt comes after Zappa.txt when using the dos dir command (same with exploreXP) but ~test.txt comes at the start of the list when using Windows Explorer and in TFS.

Is there any registry setting (on the TFS-server) that I can modify to change the way TFS sorts ?

Or is there some special character I could put in front of my special value fields to have them listed at the end ?

Thanks.

paso

From what I saw it isn't possible to change the sort order. However, in TFS SP 1 there will be support for "WIT Custom Controls" (see link below) that should allow you to display the field values in whatever sequence you'd like (in theory).

http://blogs.msdn.com/bharry/archive/2006/06/15/632236.aspx

HTH

Kevinbe

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