Moving work-items instead of copying, to preserve their IDs

[igjese]

Hi all, we need to move 1.5M work-items within the same organization. Requirement is to preserve IDs, i.e. actually move items, not copy them.

So far we were not able to find the way to do it in the documentation. Is this possible at all? Could someone point us in the right direction?

Thanks in advance!
Igor

[MrHinsh]

If you are moving items from Project A to Project B within the same organisation, you can use the "Move to team project" command on the work items in the UX. For the number of work items you have Id write a PowerShell script to poke the REST API for each work itrem. Should be really fast.

The documentation for the REST API sucks so you may want to use the developer tools in Edge to see what its calling when you do it in the UX and replicate that.

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[igjese]

Thanks for your reply!

We are already doing smaller scale stuff via our own scripts that call REST APIs, but the whole process takes a lot of steps and time even for e.g. 10.000 items.

Very simplified procedure looks something like this:

1. We are tagging items and noting down their IDs, states, etc; then break their links to test cases,
2. Then move items in batches cycling through different accounts (because throttling kicks in after several hundred items), updating states in target project (since after move, the items are reset to "new" state),
3. In target we are then recreating test plans and copying test cases
4. And finally we are recreating the links from work items to test cases' copies.

And lot of checks and sub-steps.

We were hoping to use the migration tool to alleviate some of that pain, without such tool or equivalent we don't realistically see how to make the migration of 1.5M items feasible :/

[MrHinsh]

The migration tool takes care of all of that... but you get new ID's.