Clark One Click Child Links

Overview

You can use this extension to apply templates for commonly created tasks for PBIs, PBIs for Features, and so on.

For example, to create tasks for the high-level steps involved in setting up a new CICD. When the extension is used on an work item with a specific tag, the task templates that are defined in the ADO project with the filter for that tag are applied to the work item.

This extension could also be used to quickly create tasks for peer reviews or deployment tasks, but it can be used to create any type of child work item that is defined in the templates for your project.

Create One Click Child Templated Tasks

To apply existing templates, use the extension from the board, expanded, or detail view of a work item. See Configuring One Click Child Templates if you need to create new ones.

After applying the templates, a dialog will appear showing the number of child work items that were created. If no child work items were created, a message will be shown indicating that no templates matched the parent work item.

Board View

To apply templates from the board or sprint view, click the details menu (three dots) on the work item card and select "1-Click Child Links".

Expanded View

To apply templates from the expanded view of a work item, click the details menu and select the "1-Click Child Links" button.

Detail View

To apply templates from the detail view of a work item, click the details menu and select the "1-Click Child Links" button.

How does it work?

The One Click Child Links extension allows you to create child work items from a parent work item based on work item templates that are defined in the team settings for your Azure DevOps project. Read more about creating work item templates.

Templates are selected to be applied based on the following criteria:

• The team that the parent work item belongs to
• The type of the parent work item
  • Children of the parent work item type are created, ex. if the extension is used on a Product Backlog Item, it will look for Task templates. If the parent work item is a Feature, it will look for Product Backlog Item templates
• The filter values defined in the template description. Read more about filters.

Configuring One Click Child Templates

To configure templates that can be applied with the extension you must create work item templates. Work item templates can be created in the Azure DevOps project settings under the Team Configuration option in the Boards section. See the official documentation. These are intended to be applied when creating a new work item, but this extension takes advantage of this feature rather than storing templates in a separate backend service.

When creating a work item template to be used with this extension, you are able to specify filters in the description (read more about filters) and use macros in the template fields (see macros below).

Warning: Be sure to add default values for required fields in the template if there are any (ex. Priority for PBIs) or else the extension will not be able to create the child work items.

Filters

Filters are defined in the description of the template to specify which parent work items the template should be applied to. Common use cases for filters include:

• creating tasks for PBIs that have a specific tag
• creating tasks for PBIs that are in a specific state

If no filters are defined, the template will be applied to any work item that is directly above the work item type of the template. For example, if a PBI template is defined with no filters in the description, it will be applied whenever the extension is used on a Feature.

Warning: While they are optional, it's recommended to always define filters in the template description to ensure that the template is only applied to the intended parent work items. If no filters are defined, the template will be applied to all parent work items of the specified type.

There are two ways to define filters in the template description:

Simplified

This extension is most commonly used to apply templated tasks. If you only want to limit the type of parent work item that the task template applies to (since tasks can be children of both PBIs and Bugs), you can put a list of applicable parent work item types in the child template's description field, like this:

[Product Backlog Item,Defect]

Complex

To define a more complex filter, you can put a minified (single line) JSON string into the child template's description field. The keys of the JSON object are the field names of the parent work item, and the values are the values that the field must have for the template to be applied. The JSON object can contain multiple key-value pairs to filter on multiple fields. See the work item properties table below for a list of properties that can be used in the filter.

Example:

{"applywhen":[{"System.State": "Committed", "System.Tags" : ["CI/CD"], "System.WorkItemType": "Tools Request"}]}

Note: Tools Request is a custom work item type, similar to a PBI.

Here you can use a json object with a single key applywhen that contains an array of objects. Each object in the array is a filter that must match the parent work item for the template to be applied. The example above will apply the template only when the parent work item is in the Committed state, has the CI/CD tag, and is of type Tools Request.

Example:

{ "applywhen": { "Custom.DBD.Type" : ["Heavy", "Lite", "Maybe", "Moderate", "Only"] } }

This example will apply the template when the parent work item has a custom field Custom.DBD.Type with one of the values Heavy, Lite, Maybe, Moderate, or Only.

Macros

You can reference properties of the parent work item in the template fields using macros. The following macros are supported (letter case does not matter):

Parent Work Item Properties

You can also reference properties of the parent work item directly using curly braces {}. This includes (but is not limited to) the following:

Custom fields can also be referenced, for example Custom.DBD.Type field.

Field names cannot contain spaces. Generally .s are used to separate words in field names, so Custom.DBD.Type is the correct way to reference a custom field named DBD Type.

Release notes

• v1.2.1

  • update readme and add usage doc

• v1.2.0

  • update to get the associated team from the parent work item area path
  • update to use the latest version of the Azure DevOps Extension SDK
    • note that this SDK update will allow for compatibility with ADO Services but will break compatibility with ADO Server
  • update to use the latest version of the Azure DevOps API
  • various package updates and bug fixes

• v1.1.5

  • update readme and add usage doc

• v1.1.4

  • improve communication to user when 0 matching templates are found

• v1.1.3

  • include templates all templates by default unless excluded by a filter

• v1.1.1

  • normalize macro casing so that the user can use any casing for the macros in the template description
  • improve @me macro to correctly mention the user

• v1.0.1

  • improve popups to inform user of how many child work items are created, including when there were no child work items created

• v1.0.0

  • refactored to TypeScript
  • added support for simple dialog to inform user of success or failure
  • various package updates and bug fixes

• v0.13.1

  • added support for tags to be applied to child work items

• v0.13.0

  • simplified the field replacement logic

• v0.12.1

  • first Clark EPT release of the extension Forked from https://github.com/figueiredorui/1-click-child-links

Credits

1-Click Child-Links is an Azure DevOps extension for creating multiple work items as children via single click, where each work item is based on a single pre-defined template. This extension is a Clark fork of the 1-Click Child-Links extension by Rui Figueiredo.

Rui originally cloned from https://github.com/cschleiden/vsts-extension-ts-seed-simple