The TFS Time tracker has got a good feature in that is makes use of time rollup when looking at the highest ticket in the hierarchy. As a sample, an Epic ticket on our side has a total for hours worked on child tickets as 309 odd hours.
I have however added the Completed work field to the Epic ticket, but this field does not get updated.
When looking the work items fields when we use the service hooks after a work item update, we can also not get that value for the total hours worked on the Epic item.
Would it not be possible to include this value on the work items so that we can easily access this value when we use the VSTS API's to access the work items? This would make it a bit easier to get the required data from a work item.
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Marais, do I get your point correct - you want to have an easy way to see the total time of all children elements in a field in the work item form?
As you already mentioned, the completed work feature will not help, as this is only adding all times of that particular work item. Despite that querying all children time records can be pretty time extensive (which possibly appears to be solvable), it means that moving items from one parent to the other will significantly change the numbers displayed in the whole top chain of upper level items. Is that what you are looking for?
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Hi Mark,
With regards to your point on when a work item's parent is changed - that is a good point that I did not initially consider.
From the API documentation, it looks like it is not possible to query the time data for a specific work item. Would it be possible to provide an API where we can supply the work item id and get the time worked for that work item and all child work items? Providing that would also be of help for us.
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Marais, the information about the parents (parent, top-parent, full path) is very high on our priority list and partly already available.
In the new Times Explorer (available next week - 32/2017) you can add the TFS fields about parent information to your view and export.
In Timetracker's Reporting API you can query the Timetracker based information, and additionally query the TFS/VSTS API about the fields of parent / path of levels.
The most convenient way however is a dedicated field from within Timetracker giving parent ID and top-parent ID, which is currently available only in the export from the budgets tab. These fields will be added to Times Explorer and the Reporting API soon as well, but there is no ETA yet.
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