Hi everyone,

I recently had a topic about how to populate the "Filed Against" field using an xml map. That has been resolved, but I am seeing some odd behavior and thought a new topic would be more appropriate.

Circumstances demand that, for these imports, no work item be left with a Filed Against value of "Unassigned." Therefore, every expected value has a value tag entry in the map. If that particular field in the CSV file is blank, I wrote a line to map it to a new Category, "Undefined," as follows:

<attribute sourceId="Components" targetId="category">
    <value sourceId="" targetId="Undefined" />
    ...
</attribute>

I imported 1000 work items. 85 of these had either a blank "Components" field, or a value we're not  maintaining. When I queried after the import finished, 85 work items were still "Unassigned," and none were "Undefined." I realized my mistake, and set the sourceId of the line to "*" so that any unaccounted for value (blank or otherwise) would be mapped to "Undefined" by default. After clearing out the work items and re-importing all 1000, I see that all work items which had a blank "Component" field were still "Unassigned," while all the others were "Undefined."

The apparent behavior is that, when specifying a default value in the xml mapping, a blank value for the field being mapped to the "Filed Against" attribute completely ignores the specified default value, and gets imported as "Unassigned." This is not the case in other attributes (I have a line for importing to the "Planned For" field which acknowledges blank values and assigns them correctly). Is this intentional, or could it be a bug?