Possible to update Summary field in links?

We are looking for ways to update the Summary field which is part of work item links.

Here’s our problem. We have a project which has almost all of its work items created via Work Item Templates. When the work items are created, the Summary field in the work items is a standard set of text, something like “As a <role>, we need….”.

When the work items are created, the Summary field contents are copied into the parent/child links themselves.

Later the users replace the work item Summaries with actual Summaries, but these updates don’t get copied into the Summary fields in the links.

Here’s why it matters. In the Eclipse client we have queries that show the Parent field as one of the columns. In the query results view the data that is shown for the Parent field comes from the link rather than going out and loading the actual parent work item Summary data. So we see the original standard “As a <role>, we need….” for all work items rather than the correct, existing data. If we manually open the parent work item that row’s Parent data does update to the correct data.

The web client doesn’t have this behavior.

Is there a way to force the Summary attributes in the links to be re-written with the current data? If not, is there an API to do this in the Link Manager APIs?