Configure and Manage Categories

Work Items have a standard multivalued field called Categories. By assigning one or more Category values to Work Items, you add yet another parameter for ad hoc queries, reporting, and dashboards.

Category values are purely arbitrary — you can define any scheme that's appropriate to your needs using whatever semantics you want. For example, you might define a Category named User Interface or Look & Feel for all Work Items that relate to your application's user interface. You would then be able to query for items having that value in their Categories field, and dashboards and report Pages would be able to report information such as unresolved, or defect type items having the Category.

An administrator must define Categories before they can be assigned to Work Items. This configuration is available only in the Project scope, as Categories only apply to individual projects, and not to all projects globally.

Create new Categories

  1. Log in with administrator permissions for the project you want to configure.

  2. Enter Administration .

  3. Open the project you want to configure.

  4. In Navigation, expand Work Items, and select Categories.

    A table appears in the top section of the page listing all Categories currently defined for the project (if any). The lower section shows the properties of the current selection in the upper table.

  5. In the toolbar of the top section of the configuration page, click the Create New Category button. A form appears in the lower section of the page in which you can specify the properties of the new Category.

  6. Fill in the properties of the new Category.

    • ID - an alphanumeric identifier that is unique in the project. (Required.)

    • Name - the human-readable name that appears to end users in the pick list in the Categories field of Work Items. (Required.)

    • Description - a short text that explains the purpose of the Category. It appears to end users when they hover over the Category in the Categories field of Work Items. (Optional - but recommended.)

  7. Click the Create button to finish.

Edit existing Categories

You can edit the properties of an existing Category, to expand the description, or make the name more descriptive, for example.

  1. Open the relevant project, enter Administration, expand the Work Items node and select Categories.

  2. Select a Category in the Categories table.

  3. In the Category's detail pane, click Edit. The data in the pane becomes editable.

  4. Change the properties as desired. You can modify all except ID.

  5. Click Save to save your changes.

Delete existing Categories

You can only delete a Category if it is not assigned to any Work Items in their Categories field.

When editing an existing Category, the Delete button appears beside the Edit button. If any Work Items are currently associated with the Category, the Delete button is disabled ,and you cannot delete the Category.

If you really want to delete a Category that has been assigned to Work Items, you need to run a query to locate all the affected Work Items, and then use Bulk Edit to remove the Category you want to delete from the Categories field of all of them.

When there are no Work Items using a Category, you can delete it following these steps:

  1. Enter project Administration.

  2. Navigate to Work Items Categories.

  3. In the table of Categories, select the Category to delete, then in the lower detail pain click the Delete button and respond affirmatively to the confirmation prompt.