We do not support this and I'd avoid this. In RTC 3 we have more capabilities to modify a field across multiple work items.

Chris,

If you have batch updates that you need to do regularly and cannot do them from the clients, I would recommend submitting enhancement requests describing the scenarios that you are looking for that are not currently covered and to help you in the short term investing some time to develop helper scripts/code using the API to meet your needs.

-Sean

We do not support this and I'd avoid this. In RTC 3 we have more capabilities to modify a field across multiple work items.

Why exactly is this not supported and why would you avoid it?

We certainly can do multiple WI state changes using the UI, but you have to have a path from the current to target states. If one doesn't exist then prior to doing the mass update you would have to modify the workflow account for the action then cleanup afterwards by removing the action. This also doesn't address a scenario where you have multiple WIs in different states and would have to setup many legal transitions from various states to the target.

I have done this a few times w/ 3.0 and have had no issue. I have seen that you have to be absolutely certain that the states in the import file are an exact match to the ones in the WI type workflow, otherwise they wind up in an uninitialized state and will have to be corrected, through a batch update (.csv). For example if the legitimate state is "In Progress" and in the csv it is listed as "in Progress" the WIs would be updated but end up uninitialized.

If there are any other issues that result from importing and updating states in this method I'd be very interested to know. We have imported a large volume of records from another CRM system and have to do occasional tweaks to the previously imported records which sometimes includes modifying states in batch.