Are there any negative effects from renaming an RTC project?

Janet Charbonneau (85●17●48) | asked Dec 16 '15, 5:13 p.m.

I have been asked to rename our RTC project which we having been using for the past 3 year with many custom work items, queries and dashboards plus links to RQM projects. If I go into the project and select "Manage this project area" and then go to the name at the top and change that name, are there any negative impacts to the project, work items, queries, links or dashboards? We have links between that project and two RQM projects so will any of those links break if the project is renamed?

Accepted answer

permanent link

Kevin Ramer (4.5k●6●175●196) | answered Dec 18 '15, 3:11 p.m.

From the for what it's worth department, my team has a wiki to which we add odd but somewhat frequent occurrences ( e.g. dashboard loosing scroll bar ) and we wrote a post about changing a project/team area name:

Changing Project or Team Area Names

Normally names of objects in RTC/QM are mutable (i.e. user with authority can change). However, there can be temporary unwanted side effects.

User's bookmarks that have the old project name will be broken and will give "access errors"
Reporting may show empty lists for report parameters
Charts will be blank until the historical data jobs run at their scheduled execution time

The run of certain data warehouse jobs will correct the 2nd item, but the first may be more insidious as one has no control over what URI get added to any user's collection of bookmarks.

=======================================

As I recall, notices about a work item do not include any info about a specific project in any link (e.g. https://jazz08:12443/jazz/resource/itemName/com.ibm.team.workitem.WorkItem/80423 )

Janet Charbonneau selected this answer as the correct answer

Comments

Janet Charbonneau commented Dec 21 '15, 8:31 a.m.

Thanks for the info!!! I can easily schedule all of the data warehouse jobs to run after renaming the project.

One other answer

Most liked answers ↑|Newest answers|Oldest answers

permanent link

Kevin Ramer (4.5k●6●175●196) | answered Dec 17 '15, 2:07 p.m.

This kind of change will mostly affect user-created browser bookmarks. Not much one can do about that really. The association links use the UUID of the linked project (e.g. the last part of the link url might look something like /_u9UlETpXEeKRU9ODuVDBoQ )

It is possible that custom clients might be using the project area name to lookup the project for connection. For example, I maintain a client that is an intermediary between a custom database and an RTC project. The configuration of the client uses the project name, not the UUID.

Basically, changing the name is relatively safe and most interactions won't be disturbed.

Comments

Guido Schneider commented Dec 18 '15, 6:52 a.m. | edited Dec 18 '15, 6:53 a.m.

Like Kevin writes, the links between artefacts are safe from change.
But all URL's used (not only in bookmarks) will not work anymore.

Our projects are using the URL's in many places e.g. widgets, documents, emails etc.. For example to reference plans/views/queries/Dashboard Tabs/reports etc..
All this will not work anymore when PA is renamed.

Unfortunately there is nothing like PERMALINK available in RTC. DoorsNext has this concept and there you have a PERMALINK button in the breadcrumb!

So in our case of heavy using RTC such a change is very SEVERE and not relatively safe.

Janet Charbonneau commented Dec 18 '15, 2:22 p.m.

Kevin, thanks for your answer. I have been testing it out in our sandbox area and haven't found any issues, but wanted to check in case somebody else knew of problems down the road.

Guido, I understand if there are emails or documents that reference that project, but what widgets have problems with this project name change? I am not seeing any issues at all with the widgets on our dashboards when we tested this in our sandbox area.

It's all about the answers!

Related questions

Are there any negative effects from renaming an RTC project?

Accepted answer

Changing Project or Team Area Names

One other answer

Your answer