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Deleting presentations/attributes from work item editor without affecting old work items?


Charles Cruse (1521213) | asked Aug 28 '14, 10:53 a.m.

I have read the articles/questions about adding fields and then using 'synchronize' to impact existing work items.

I am wanting to REMOVE some of the fields in a custom work item I created last year. However, I don't want to lose the ability to view any of the information that may have been saved in the past in those fields.  I want this change to only affect newly created work items.  I haven't been able to come up with a way to do this.  Every time that I delete a section or a presentation/attribute within a section, when I check the old work item, the information in the old work item is gone.

Is what I am trying possible?  If so, how do I manage this?  Our production server is at RTC 4.0.1, soon to go to RTC 4.0.7.  I have been testing this out on our 4.0.7 sandbox server.

Thanks!

Comments
Susan Hanson commented Aug 28 '14, 11:04 a.m.

I'm not aware of any way to have two different editors based on when the work item was created.

You could add a tab of "removed attributes" that would have all of those fields/attributes in a R/O way, so that it wouldn't show in the normal place, but that you could see the values that were there (but not change).

You can always see the values in a column of a Query output, but yea, if you remove it from the editor, that one and only one editor is used for all work items (to my knowledge).


Donald Nong commented Aug 28 '14, 8:41 p.m.

 You may want to play around with those "hide-if-*" attributes of a field and see if you can make them disappear as you wish.

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Alex Akilov (1211724) | answered Aug 28 '14, 11:12 a.m.
edited Aug 28 '14, 11:13 a.m.
One thing you can try is to create a second project area (e.g. named Archive Project Area) that maintains all of the old attributes and move all of the older work items to that archival project area.  Any attribute updates you make to the in-progress project area will eliminate those attributes from newly created work items and when you choose to archive those work items (by moving them to the archival project area) those attributes in the newer work items will simply not contain a value in the archival project area

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Charles Cruse (1521213) | answered Aug 28 '14, 12:09 p.m.

Thanks for the quick replies.

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N Z (3622127) | answered Aug 28 '14, 11:17 p.m.
 If you remove the attributes from the editor, the values for the existing work items are still there, you just can't see them in the form. So if you wanted to extract the data using a query, you still could. Also, the information will still be in the history.

It may not be sufficient for what you are trying to do, it just depends on how you are going to view the the old data.

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