There is currently no way to filter/hide archived attributes in the column selection in the query editor.  This is Enhancement/RFE Deleted custom attributes should not be visible in Query (239280).   Ralph's suggestion to rename the attributes is a possible way to improve the experience today.

Hi Subba, I don't think that this is possible. One thing you can do is to set the name of the attribute for example to zzz_deprecated_<oldname>, so that people know to avoid them. This also moves them to the end of the list and accidentally using them is less likely.

Hi Michael/Ralph, We can't rename this archived attributes since we don't find it anywhere in the project area configuration. We are using process sharing deployment approach where we have a child project area (consumer) which consumes the process shared by its associated Master project area (provider). In January month this year, we have changed the ID of all our custom attributes. To upgrade our existing pilot projects (which were created from our old template) to use our new custom process template, we have to create a new master project area and then point the child project area to this new master. After the upgrade, we see all these archived attributes in query GUI. The workaround can't be acceptable because of the following reasons. First of all we don't find these archived fields anywhere in the list of attributes. We just see it while creating queries. So I am not sure from where we can rename it. 1) All these archived fields are not present in our template today and hence we can't include them in our template and we also don't want this either. This problem is only on the upgraded project areas (not on new project area provisioning as our template is without all this archived fields) and hence this workaround of renaming the fields will be required to be done manually as a part of upgrade. This has to be done manually on all the upgraded project areas which I don’t think will be acceptable solution. 2) There are more than 100 fields which would have got archived after an upgrade to our new normalized template. We have to provide the instruction for renaming this 100 more fields/attributes which is not feasible. This can be feasible if we know where these fields are getting stored and how to rename it depending in their location (may be in database). We would then check if we can provide the utility to rename these archived attributes so that support team just execute it and we are done. If we know where these fields are located then we would be deleting them rather than renaming it if there is no impact on the existing records created prior to upgrade.

you cannot delete a field. ever. you can rename it (if you have the definition) but if the master took it out (for the future projects) you won't.

and be careful.. we have found a couple fun things..

we had an enum
some workitems used it
we removed the enum
the new template has the ;Attribute Validation' advisor turned on (we have one field that needs a specific format)
but now we get a failure, as the enum used by the old workitems is missing, so the validator fails and u can't save the workitem anymore (even tho the UI says it is no longer used)

Hi Sam,

thanks for the information and suggestion. We will be careful with this.

Do you need to sync the old work items in order to bring your old work items compatible with your changes in the project area?

Hi Subba,

Since we can't rename or delete the archive attributes, what do you suggest us to proceed with this? Do we have any workaround?

Regards,

Darshan Patel

 This is resolved in RTC 4.0.4:  Allow for filtering of archived attributes for specification of query results (columns, sorting) (118438)

Thanks Michael. Is this mentioned in New & Noteworthy section which we can refer?