How to: Edit and Save a WorkItem

You can view and edit the individual Fields, Links, and Attachments of a WorkItem. As soon as you make any edits to these parts of a WorkItem, the IsDirty property marks the WorkItem as dirty.

You can commit changes to a WorkItem to the server with the Save method. Unless you save a work item, you will lose all changes to the WorkItem.

During a save, the rules defined for the WorkItemType are evaluated. Violations will throw exceptions upon saving. If there are no violations, the WorkItem saves successfully, incrementing its revision, and updating its history with the latest changes.

Example

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Text;
using Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Client;
using Microsoft.TeamFoundation.WorkItemTracking.Client;


namespace WorkItemTrackingSample2
{
    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            // Connect to the server and the store.
            TeamFoundationServer tfs = TeamFoundationServerFactory.GetServer("YourTfsServerNameHere");
            WorkItemStore workItemStore = (WorkItemStore)tfs.GetService(typeof(WorkItemStore));

            // Get a specific WorkItem from the store.
            //   Replace "12345" with a WorkItem ID appropriate for testing.
            WorkItem workItem = workItemStore.GetWorkItem(12345);

            // Save the existing Priority so we can restore it later.
            int oldPriority = (int)workItem.Fields["Priority"].Value;

            // Set the Priority to an arbitrarily high number.
            workItem.Fields["Priority"].Value = 9999;

            // Display the results of this change.
            if (workItem.IsDirty)
                Console.WriteLine("The workItem has changed, but has not been saved.");

            if (workItem.IsValid() == false)
                Console.WriteLine("The workItem is not valid.");

            if (workItem.Fields["Priority"].IsValid == false)
                Console.WriteLine("The workItem's Priority field is not valid.");

            // Tries to save the invalid WorkItem.
            try
            {
                workItem.Save();
            }
            catch (ValidationException)
            {
                Console.WriteLine("The workItem threw a ValidationException.");
            }

            // Set the priority to a more reasonable number.
            if (oldPriority == 1)
                workItem.Fields["Priority"].Value = 2;
            else
                workItem.Fields["Priority"].Value = 1;

            // If the WorkItem is valid, saves the changed WorkItem.
            if (workItem.IsValid())
            {
                workItem.Save();
                Console.WriteLine("The workItem saved this time.");
            }

            // Restore the WorkItem's Priority to its original value.
            workItem.Fields["Priority"].Value = oldPriority;
            workItem.Save();
        }
    }
}

See Also

Concepts

Essentials of Work Item Tracking Object Model

Work Item Tracking Architecture