This is a follow-up to a question I previously posted on the Jazz forum (https://jazz.net/forum/questions/111709/automatically-append-text-to-the-summary-field).  My ultimate purpose is to make the standard links display for our parent work items more useful for our teams.  In other words, if two of our custom work item fields were to be displayed before the summary of each child work item on the standard links tab, that would be very beneficial to our teams.  (The standard links presentation seems to show the ID and Summary of each related work item.)

   The answers I received to my previous question suggested that we either need to use a script based calculated value (https://jazz.net/wiki/bin/view/Main/AttributeCustomization - this article happens to be for RTC v3.0) or an Operation Participant (Java plug-in).  Further reading seemed to suggest that the script approach is preferred over the Java plug-in approach.  (The recommendation seems to be first, use built-in functionality.  Second, use scripting.  Third, use Java plug-in.)

   Before I go too far with scripting, I wanted to see if there is a simpler approach. 

Question #1)  Is there a way to copy and modify the standard links presentation to pull this off?  We essentially want the standard links display but with a couple extra (custom) fields displayed for each linked child work item.  See the example below.  (Those custom fields would only be populated for a certain type of work item.)  Would that be simpler than scripting an appending of fields to the summary field? 

Question #2) Is there an even better way to accomplish this?  (My experimentation with query results was disappointing in terms of the ability to list parent and child attributes together on the same result row.  Manual drill down by row was needed to see related work-item information.) 

Question #3) If scripting the append text to summary is the simplest and best answer, do we need to use the general script editor or is there a way we can use the standard field customization screens maybe with a line or two of scripting behind a few fields to have custom fields appended to the beginning of the Summary field?

As an example, one way to script this might be the following:

On save of work item:

1.       Search Summary field for first occurrence of a delimiter character.

2.       If delimiter found, clear any text from the summary up to that point and make sure the delimiter remains with a space before and after the delimiter.

3.       If delimiter not found, append a space, delimiter, space to the beginning of the Summary field.

4.       Append Source code name, space, and Source code version to the beginning of the summary (leaving space, delimiter, space in place following the two appended fields).

Standard field:

1.       Summary (Example: “CM47: Add new function to the Case Management screen)

Custom fields:

1.       Source code name (Example: “SPKG_CASE.PKB”)

2.       Source code version (Example: “1.5”)

Result (Summary field):

·         SPKG_CASE.PKB 1.5 / CM47: Add new function to the Case Management screen