Backup workitems on VS Team Services

Question

Is it possible to backup/export/download all work items in some way? I had a look at the REST API but it seems you can't execute f.e. a query through this API...

Answer 1

Ok, found a way to get the job done. I had a look again at the API Documentation. The page https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/docs/integrate/api/wit/overview helped me out. You first need to do a

GET https://{account}.visualstudio.com/defaultcollection/{project}/_apis/wit/queries/{folderpath}?api-version={version}&$expand=wiql

From the resulting JSON you need to get the wiql part, which is the actual query. After this you need to do a

POST https://{account}.visualstudio.com/defaultcollection/{project}/_apis/wit/wiql?api-version={version}

Where the body is the JSON with { "query" = "YOURQUERY" }

As a result you will receive a JSON containing all workitem urls/ids. You need to go through them and query each single workitem via

GET URL?$expand=all

Notice: add ?$expand=all only if you need the relations and attachments too. I put something together in for PowerShell. Note: I decided to hardcode the query and to remove the error handling to make it a little shorter.

function loadJsonFile($fileName) 
{
    return ConvertFrom-Json "$(Get-Content $fileName)"
}
function getLastItemFromURL($url) 
{
    $absPath = ([System.Uri]$url).AbsolutePath
    $lastSlash = $absPath.LastIndexOf("/")
    $absPath.Substring($lastSlash+1)
}
function getWorkItemId($url)
{
    getLastItemFromURL($url)
}

# make sure you enabled alternative credentials and access for them
# you can get the value for YOURCODE i.e. via Fiddler
$headers = @{Authorization="Basic YOURCODE"}

# before this you would need to find the WIQL of the query; left to you
$body = @{  
    "query" = "THEQUERYFROMTHEJSON"
}
$bodyJson = $body | ConvertTo-Json

Invoke-RestMethod -method Post -ContentType application/json -Uri "https://{account}.visualstudio.com/defaultcollection/{project}/_apis/wit/wiql?api-version=1.0" -Headers $headers -Body $bodyJson -OutFile workitems.json

$workItemsJson = $(loadJsonFile workitems.json)
$workItems = $(foreach ($relation in $workItemsJson.workItemRelations)
{
    $relation.target.url
    $relation.source.url
}) | select -Unique | sort

echo "Going to download the following ids from $(getWorkItemId $workItems[0])-$(getWorkItemId $workItems[-1])"

# download the workitems
foreach($workItemUrl in $workItems)
{
    $workItemId = getWorkItemId $workItemUrl
    echo "Download ID: $workItemId"

    $workItemUrl = "$workItemUrl`?`$expand=all"
    $fileName = "workitem_$workItemId.json"
    Invoke-RestMethod -ContentType application/json -Uri "$workItemUrl" -Headers $headers -OutFile "$fileName"

    # download attachments
    $workItemJson = $(loadJsonFile "$fileName")
    foreach($relation in $workItemJson.relations)
    {
        if($relation.rel -eq "AttachedFile") 
        {
            $fileUrl = $relation.url
            Invoke-WebRequest $fileUrl -Headers $headers -OutFile $(getLastItemFromURL $fileUrl)
        }
    }
}

Answer 2

You could export work item queries to Excel using Team Foundation add-in to Excel as described here