TFS Work Item Customisation, and the TF26201 error

With the work I’ve been doing defining custom Work Item Types in TFS lately, I came across an interesting problem, to do with TFS’ TF26201 error, so I thought I’d mention it here, along with how I went about sorting it out.

So, having finished the first cut of the first work item type definition, I went to test it, and discovered that some when changing a test work item to certain states and attempting to save, Team Explorer would fail to save in the new state, with an error:

“TF26201: This work item has unsupported fields, or user does not have permissions”.

I googled the error (as you do) and didn’t have much joy. A couple of people found this problem when doing stuff with the W.I.T object model, but I couldn’t find anything about tracking down whats wrong when testing custom work items using Team Explorer. So, to figure out what was causing the problem, heres what I did:

 

1. Edit the work item type definition file, commenting out all field rules in the “To” state, and upload back to server
2. Try saving item to the new state, which should work now, as there are now no field restrictions in place for that state
3. Uncomment all the field rules from the “To” state again, and again upload to server
4. Open work item and try to save as-is, without changes
5. Team Explorer will complain about specific fields, instead of the general error message
    

For the record, the reason I was receiving this error was because I had some fields in a couple of states with “<EMPTY />” rules, scoped to the STATE. Removing these fixed the issue, and I’m going to try scoping these to the a specific TRANSITION instead.

TFS Process Customisation Part 1: Work Item Types

So, as mentioned in my last post, I’ve been working on a project to create a Process Template that covers one of our internal software lifecycle processes.

The first part of this project that I’ve been working on is customising Work Item Types. We’ve got a few to do, and it’s not so much a “customisation” process as a “create from scratch” process, because the work items we’re creating really bear no resemblance to the out-of-the-box ones. To start with, I’ve got over 90 fields to define, up to 13 states and something like 25 transitions to define per work item type…I’ve been wondering why I let myself in for this recently!! J

Still, most of the work item types I need are just variations on a theme, so once I’ve got the first one done, the rest will be mostly cut-and-paste jobs…