Create work items in Visual Studio Team Services using PowerShell

Article
1/17/2024

Introduction

A colleague asked me an interesting question How can I create work items in VSTS using PowerShell? during a PowerShell session at my workplace which triggered me to share a TechNet Wiki article. For me, Visual Studio Team Services was a foreign matter until I made my hand dirt to gain knowledge and experience.

Requirement

The team has a source file in CSV, XML or JSON format and needs an interface which connects to a team project and creates work items. The below sequence code describes it.

sequenceDiagram
    Source File->Interface: "Backlog Information"
    loop Work Items 
    Interface->>Team Project: "Add Backlog Item"
    end

Solution

We opted to fuse Visual Studio Team Services REST API with PowerShell to accomplish the task and the authentication mechanism selected in Personal Access Token (PAT) for a demo purpose.

Create a Personal Access Token

Sign in to either your Visual Studio Team Services account (https://{youraccount}.visualstudio.com)
From your home page, open your profile (Hover on top your profile badge). Go to your security details.
In the left pane choose personal access token
Click add - Name your token
Choose the life span for your token. The default is 90 days.

Convert Personal Access Token to Base64 String

With reference to the document, we developed a nifty PowerShell snippet shared below to convert the personal access token to base 64 string.

$Token = "Personal Access Token"$Authentication = [Text.Encoding]::ASCII.GetBytes(":$Token")$Authentication = [System.Convert]::ToBase64String($Authentication)$Headers = @{    Authorization = ("Basic {0}" -f $Authentication)}$Headers.Authorization # Output(Sample)Basic PAT1234ID=

REST API Endpoint URL

The REST API endpoint URL is shown below which has three mandatory parameters: project, workitemtypename, and version. The method used in PATCH with content type application/json-patch+json

PATCH https://{instance}/DefaultCollection/{project}/_apis/wit/workitems/${workItemTypeName}?api-version={version}

Source File

The body is the main part to meet our goal. Yes, the PowerShell script will create an item in a specific team project, iteration path and assign to a team member. Underneath is the sample source file which contains value and technicians used as inputs for a title and assigned to respectively.

value	technician
New work item 1	Chendrayan Venkatesan
New work item 2	Team Member
New work item 3	Team Manager

Body parameter

In our case, we need to add an item with title, area path, iteration path and assign to technicians. So, we need to work with four fields where area and iteration path remains same. See the JSON values converted from hash table using PowerShell

@(    @{        op    = "add"        path  = "/fields/System.Title"        value = $value    }    @{        op    = "add"        path  = "/fields/System.AreaPath"        value = "Automation\Onpoint Scrum"    }    @{        op    = "add"        path  = "/fields/System.IterationPath"        value = "Automation\FY18-M01_JULY"    }    @{        op    = "add"        path  = "/fields/System.AssignedTo"        value = "Chendrayan Venkatesan"    }) | ConvertTo-Json

# Output

Thanks to PowerShell team for ConvertTo-Json cmdlet. The structure to add work items is described below

graph LR
    Automation-->Automation-Scrum
    Automation-Scrum-->FY18-M01_JULY

References

cmdlet	help
Invoke-RestMethod	help Invoke-RestMethod -Detailed
ConvertTo-Json	help ConvertTo-Json Detailed
Import-csv	help Import-csv -Detailed

With no more wait let us share the PowerShell script to add work items in bulk.

$values = Import-csv C:\Source\WIT.csv foreach ($value in $values){    $RestParams = @{        Uri         = "https://{account}/Automation/_apis/wit/workitems/`$product backlog item?api-version=1.0"           ContentType = 'application/json-patch+json'        Headers     = @{            Authorization = ("Basic {0}" -f $authentication)        }        Method      = "Patch"        Body        = @(            @{                op    = "add"                path  = "/fields/System.Title"                value = $value.value            }            @{                op    = "add"                path  = "/fields/System.AreaPath"                value = "Automation\Automation Scrum"            }            @{                op    = "add"                path  = "/fields/System.IterationPath"                value = "Automation\FY18-M01_JULY"            }            @{                op    = "add"                path  = "/fields/System.AssignedTo"                value = $value.technician            }        ) | ConvertTo-Json    }    try     {        Invoke-RestMethod @RestParams -Verbose    }    catch     {        $_.Exception.Message     }}

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