Possible to start work item IDs at a 5000 rather than 0?

Rabh Pandya (8●3●4) | asked Jan 24 '14, 11:42 a.m.

On my current project we're using RRC for requirements, and RTC for change management. Because the two are linked, and both started at the same time, they have very similar numbers. E.g. we'll often be working with 12098 RRC requirement and 11097 RTC work item. This makes things very confusing in our standups, reporting, etc.

In order to get around this I thought it'd be good if the RTC work item IDs started at 500,000 and sequentially incremented upwards from there - then it would be obvious from the numbers which are the requirements and which are change related work items.

Is there a way to do this? I know going to create a work item, but then not comitting it "reserves" that number, so theoretically I could try to create, and abandon, half a million work items using some kind of automated tool. Was hoping for something a bit more clever than that though.

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Piotr Aniola (3.7k●1●16●37) | answered Jan 24 '14, 11:52 a.m.

I don't think there is a "clever" way to do it. Also, the fact that the ID needs to be unique across project areas probably makes this a bit more complicated.
What you could do instead, is create a custom ID attribute. It could be read-only and set automatically upon artifact creation. You could set the value however you like using JavaScript. Then you could reference the artifacts using this custom ID, rather than the built-in ID.

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Rabh Pandya commented Jan 24 '14, 11:55 a.m.

Wow, thanks for the super swift response.

Unless I've misunderstood what you're saying, I didn't think the ID had to be unique across RTC and RRC. I'm sure I've seen the same ID used for different items on our RRC and RTC projects.

Or do you mean if we created multiple RTC projects and multiple RRC projects? That's not something we currently do, nor plan to.

Piotr Aniola commented Jan 24 '14, 12:00 p.m.

Yes, I meant the latter.
It would be something to keep in mind if we wanted to provide a way to manually tweak IDs, regardless of whether you would actually use it in a multi-project setting. It's just one reason why I think this is unlikely to be implemented.

Rabh Pandya commented Jan 24 '14, 12:23 p.m.

Sure, I understand.

A new thought. Is is possible to use the REST API to specify a work item ID? If so, and I specified 500000, would all subsequent creation of work items increment from there? Or is it just that 500000 would be skipped, when we eventually get to that ID.

Millard Ellingsworth commented Jan 27 '14, 7:35 p.m.

FORUM ADMINISTRATOR / JAZZ DEVELOPER

It's just a simple, auto-incrementing field that is meant to do nothing but provide a globally unique id across your repository. I can't recommend messing with it (even using Piotr's perfectly valid suggestion). Perhaps you could add a ShortTitle attribute to items and people could use that. It would set a better mental context for discussion than "11908" or "12343".

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Possible to start work item IDs at a 5000 rather than 0?

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