Work Item Rules Workarounds: Force selection of Reason

In our last post in this series, Sunder blogged about Closing down an iteration. Let’s take a look at another question: “How do I force people to select a reason? ”

We’ve had people come to us with the request to force their users to select a reason. The way State/Reason is implemented, there is always a default Reason. Therefore, its very easy for a user to just change the state, and accept the default Reason without thinking. Our customers wanted people to have to make a choice.

In the above example, the customer wants the Reason field to be blank by default.

Here is the workaround. The steps are:

1. Create a ResolvedReasonValidation field

2. Create a Form tab called “Validation Errors” and place ResolvedReasonValidation on it

3. Add a default Reason: “Select a reason” and a COPY rule on Resolved state

4. On each non-default reason, add a COPY rule

5. Add Rules on ResolvedReasonValidation

Put it all together, and this is what it looks like:

Comments

• Anonymous
  March 17, 2009
  PingBack from http://blog.a-foton.ru/index.php/2009/03/17/work-item-rules-workarounds-force-selection-of-reason/

• Anonymous
  March 22, 2009
  Visual Studio Magazine   on Inside VSTS: Inside the TFS Databases, Part 2 Jakob Ehn on How To: automatically

• Anonymous
  March 24, 2009
  My colleague, Gregg, and I have been posting a series of workarounds to achieve scenarios in Work Item

• Anonymous
  March 31, 2009
  In our last post in this series, Gregg blogged about forcing selection of reason . Let’s take a look