How can I use REST API to find work items that do not have a parent?

David Connolly (11●1) | asked Jun 24 '16, 3:08 p.m.

I'm trying to use REST to find "orphaned" task work items - that is tasks that do not have a parent story or defect. There are two parts to the problem.

1) I tried adding a filter query on parent/id but it's not queryable. I also just tried "parent" but get "unsupported type name" error. Is there some other way that I can filter based on parent?

2) Assuming there is a way to filter on parent, there's a more general question: How do I use REST API to detect that a field is empty/null/not set?

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Donald Nong (14.5k●4●14) | answered Jun 26 '16, 8:29 p.m.

I don't think you can test empty/null/nonexistence when using the REST API.

If you do not have to use the REST API, a simple work item query should suffice. Just set the condition to (Parent do not exist) & (Type is Task). If you need to do some post-processing using some kind of script, you can download the result set as a CSV file.

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How can I use REST API to find work items that do not have a parent?

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