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How can we persist the rank of work items in a plan?


June Boston (1942438) | asked Feb 18 '15, 1:07 p.m.
 Hello,

Some clients have a bit under 100 tasks in a plan, and use the order of items in the plan to rank them.  To give to other systems, they'd like to get an excel format of all these items out, but we can't seem to do that while maintaining their order.

The items can be brought up and exported to excel from a work item query, but the hidden attribute that maintains rank in a plan is not accessible.

The items can be exported from the plan into XML, which can then be imported into Excel, but the XML export does not persist rank either.

Is there a way to do this cleanly?  The only other solution I can think of is manually re-numbering a custom attribute, but that is not very efficient.

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Ralph Schoon (63.0k33645) | answered Feb 19 '15, 3:56 a.m.
FORUM ADMINISTRATOR / FORUM MODERATOR / JAZZ DEVELOPER
June,

I believe you can't export that data.

Here the last info on how ranking works: https://jazz.net/library/article/1364

Raking is done in a plan. The data is stored in the plan. There is no work item attribute for the rank. The same work item can have different ranks on different plans (I think). You can't query for it and let alone order by it in queries, since it is not an attribute (and not persisted in a work item).

There is also no global rank and, in fact, it is terribly complicated to implement something like that, especially if you consider parent child or other hierarchies. There are several work items for functionality like that. For example https://jazz.net/jazz/web/projects/Rational%20Team%20Concert#action=com.ibm.team.workitem.viewWorkItem&id=186360 . You can search on that page for e.g. "export rank" to find related work items.

You might want to vote for one or more of the enhancement requests.
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