My team's worflow and reporting system revolves around the btr_export data table. Where do I find this in v3.x?
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Hello Justyn, the API has been completely overhauled in version 3. The attempt in 2.x to periodically update a table in the database has been discontinued. The new Reporting API provides a fully dynamic access to real time data, via REST, in the OData format, protected by OAuth. Find out more in our documentation about the new API: https://support.7pace.com/hc/en-us/articles/115002713186--API-for-7pace-Timetracker-for-TFS.
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This is great, but I'm not writing an application - I'm using data views in SQL Server. It's very unfortunate this has been removed; my interface is now broken for reporting to my company. Now my choices are to roll back and lose a bunch of data or rewrite your previous data interface on my own by spelunking the TT database. Neither path looks good.
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Hi Justyn,
This decision was made because of big architectural changes and new way of extending TFS. We are using same codebase for VSTS extension (cloud based) and TFS (onprem). Allowing direct access to our database for users cannot be an option in cloud environment.
You can access OData API with SQL using SSIS (https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn584123(v=sql.110).aspx). Do you have that option?
Maxim
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SSIS won't work for me at this time. At this point my best option is to create a view by aggregating the data via digging around in the TT database myself in order to keep my reports up and running. I understand unifying the code base, but the data interface has changed on every version, requiring rewrites. Hopefully it will be relatively stable going forward.
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Let me comment on the stability of our interfaces, as we absolutely understand the importance of this topic.
When we developed this first Reporting API for Timetracker 2.x, the extension model Timetracker 3 is based upon was not even announced by Microsoft. One of the biggest challenges in planning and development of Timetracker 3 was that the old Reporting API could under no circumstances be continued, for reasons out of our control.
We are aware that customers need to adjust their system landscapes when updating to Timetracker 3's Reporting API, as we had to release one time only a new concept of accessing the data. This is bad and we'd like to express our apologies for it.
However, we'd like to say that we care a lot about providing reliable interfaces. We are just ahead in releasing the new Control API, which goes way beyond the power and complexity available with the Reporting API. With that step, we also adopted the codex that our provided API's are being versioned and kept available in future releases.
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