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I am looking for a fancy way the print individual work items in TFS. OK ... maybe not the work item directly but I need to produce printable forms based on data on a work item. And by fancy I mean: header, footer, formatting, tables maybe ... stuff like that.
No, I am not trying to print a list of work items, read carefully, I need an output based on a single work item.
For those who are wondering "Why on earth do you need that?" I should say: We are keeping everything on TFS around here. (For now only software development stuff, but I am thinking bigger...) Sometimes somethings need to be on hard copy, to be signed for instance, and that is why I need printable forms.
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Print items To print work item details, open a query in Visual Studio that contains the work item(s) you want to print, and select or highlight those items that you want to print. Then, choose the Print option from the context menu.
Each work item is based on a work item type. And work item types have a unique identifier within an organization or project collection. The available work item types depend on the process you used when creating your project (Agile, Basic, Scrum, or CMMI). Use work items to track anything you need to track.
Open Work Items You can start viewing and adding work items once you connect to a project. (1) Check that you've selected the right project, then (2) choose Boards>Work Items. Open Visual Studio 2019, Team Explorer, and then choose Work Items.
I came up with a solution a little interesting from my point of view.
I used the "mail merge" function of MS Word to print work items. I prepared an SQL query that reads whatever fields are needed from TFS database and set the query as a datasource for mail marge.
Now I can design a word document of any kind and use TFS fields in the document. I just select the appropriate record by work item number and voila!! my printable work item is ready.
It is a little slow when selecting a work item if you use a query that returns all work items, but who is perfect? Right ?
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Though I agree that Reporting Services is probably the best way to accomplish this, you could alternatively write a web application that queries TFS and formats the data into a nice, printable HTML page. If you really wanted to, you could even look at some of the PDF libraries that are out there and just form-fill a PDF.
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