'Description' field changes to 'Read-only' after the work item has been initially created, but should not because it only has a rule of 'Required'

Question

We have a custom 'Description' field of type 'HTML' that has a single 'Required' rule. but for whatever reason, once a work item has been created, the 'Description' field instantaneoulsy changes to 'Read-only'.

I'm trying to update the 'Description' field on multiple tickets in Excel (approx. 3000) and cannot because of this.

Any help in disabling this 'Read-only' state would be greatly appreciated.

---

mike dailey

Answer 1

There is probably a state transition that has made it read only. Move it to a different state and it should be editable.

Answer 2

Hi Allen,

Thanks for the reply, unfortunately that did not do the trick.

I've been doing a little more digging, and it appears the problem may be because our custom 'Description' field has a field type = 'HTML'.

I'm not having a problem with any other items that have field types of 'String' or 'Plain Text'.

And unfortunately, I don't think I can easily change the field type to soemthing other than what it is, and then back without causing other problems.

Any other ideas would be greatly appreciated.

MD

 

---

mike dailey

Answer 3

I have found a website that pins down the problem to the way Excel handles HTML fields:

"TFS has changed how Excel interacts with HTML fields to only allow HTML fields to be editable on creation of a work item but read only when editing existing work items."

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/team_foundation/archive/2010/05/26/change-in-html-field-behavior-in-the-2010-tfs-excel-integration.aspx

So now that we know what the problem is, does anyone know of an 'easy' way to work around it so that I can update my 3,000 records.

Thanks for any ideas to get me through this.

MD

---

mike dailey

Answer 4

Hi MD,

Thanks for sharing the experiences here!

I would suggest you to feedback this on the following site::

    https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/

Every feedback submitted will be evaluated carefully by our engineers. If they have some feedback on it, they will

let us know their comments further through that portal.

Could you post the feedback link here so that it will be helpful to other community members having the similar question?

This would be helpful to improve Visual Studio products.

Thanks and Best Regards,

---

Cathy Kong [MSFT]
MSDN Community Support | Feedback to us

Answer 5

Hi Mike,

 

have you tried the "bulk edit" feature in Web Access?

Go to the Work Items tab in WA, run your query and once you have the query result Bulk Edit is available under Tools in the menu above the qury results.

---

Jesper Fernström
QWise Software engineering – refactored!

Answer 6

Thanks Jesper,

Fortunately (or unfortunately, however you look at it) someone has gone in a manually updated the records so that a bulk edit is not needed now.

I will use your input for using the Web Access in the future though as it looks like it'll do what I need it to do.

Thanks,

MD

---

mike dailey