Migrate work items from Beta 2 to Beta 3?

Ok, first of all let me state clearly for the record. I fully realize that MSFT does not officially support work item migration from Beta 2 to Beta 3. I also realize Beta 2 did not have a GO-LIVE license with it, so I am officially on my own on this one.

Having said that, "un-officially" is there anything I can do to half-way get this to work

When my team moved from Beta 1 Refresh -> Beta 2, we exported all of our work items to Excel, then created a new work item list within Excel for Beta 2 and then did a builk entry that way. While this worked ok, we had to manually copy over all of the history text from the old work items.

Technically I could do that this time as well, but now our work items have grown to 4,000 plus items, so I really don't want to do that by hand! (However, am willing if I have to).

In the Beta 2 CurrituckDB there is a table called "WorkItemLongTexts" that appears to have all of the history items in it. In Beta 3 there is pretty much the same table with the addition of a Rev column (appears to be number of history entries). I tried to manually enter a new row into this table expecting it to show up in the history, however this did NOT work. Am I missing something here

Is anybody else doing something to migrate their work items. I am ok with losing file attachments (if needed) but really need to keep history comments for past discussions.

Thanks!
~slee

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Migrate work items from Beta 2 to Beta 3?

anydobbo
Sure....
dcohen
Also: line 88:

Change from:

AttachmentNameNode.InnerXml = attachments[k].Comment;
to:
AttachmentCommentNode.InnerXml = attachments[k].Comment;

~slee
Mark Shoesmith
I'm thrilled you are doing this and I think other Beta testers will thank you (repeatedly :)). I'm eager to see such a tool developed and distributed for people to use. I feel bad that we weren't able to do it ourselves.

Brian
Hardik Mehta
Sure. I'll forward the code to both of you now. Also once the Beta3 extensibility kit is out I am going to write the importing code as well. So don't waste your time writting that. I'll forward you that as well, once coded and tested for it to working as expected.
-Anu.
miauru

Hi,

Would this work for migrating Work Items from one server to another I am running two machines both running release versions of Team foundation Server. I want to kill one machine and move my work items from the old machine to my new server.

I would really appreciate this if your code would work for it.

Thanks,

Keith (elcanadian@hotmail.com)
cgoodyear
Hi Slee,
I am planning to do to export all the bugs from beta2 to beta3 and i am using object model of workItem for this. I have been able to successfully create Xml file with all the workItem Data includuing History ,Links, File attachment( look at the sample app in Beta2 extensibility kit to do this) else I can even forward you the whole exporting code.
Now I'm waiting for Beta3 extensibility kit to come to try importing Work Items in Beta3 TFS server. Once I can do this successfully I'll upgrade my bug server from beta2 to beta3 and import all the workItems as well.
Good luck,
Anu
david hug
Anu,

I have had to make some other slight modifications to your code in order for this to work properly. For instance, I deleted the 'if' statement on line 169. (It was only saving the xml if the project name was 'test'.

I also had to add some code to strip out all HTML tags as well as other tags that were causing the XML create node to die (xml doesn't like '&').

How do you want me to update your code for others to use

Thanks,
~slee
Gary Lam
Excellent... thank you VERY much. This will be extremely helpful.

~slee
MikeSmo
Excellent! I knew there had to be a better way... do you mind forwarding me the exporting code (slee@questis.com<donotspam>).
Snakebite
Oh, that was cut paste error from code above for AttachmentNameNode.
Regarding 'test' project, that is actually because I forgot to remove hardcoded TeamProject name while creating Node in XMl file.
For html tag I did not have problem creating file for any tag, I guess '&' is the only one which might be causing issue.

Anu
HBN
Hi

I'm also very interested in your importer/exporter. If it is still available please could you email me at charly.anderson@removethisprefix-actix.com

thanks
HansBaltussen
Could you please also send me a copy of exporting code I'm very appreciated.

andy.pham@tabs.toshiba.com

Best Regards,
Migrate work items from Beta 2 to Beta 3?

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