Use @mentions in work items and pull requests

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The @mention control allows you to quickly add a user or group to a work item or pull request discussion. Using the people picker of the @mention control, you can select a project member or group from the search list, and they receive an email notifying them of your comment.

For organizations that manage their users and groups using Azure Active Directory (Azure AD), people pickers support searching all users and groups added to Azure AD, not only those users and groups added to your project. To limit the set to project members and groups, see Manage your organization, Limit identity search and selection.

Note

You can post an @mention via API. Get the Azure DevOps User Id, and then add the following html code: <div><a href="#" data-vss-mention="version:2.0,{user id}">@John Doe</a> Testing mentioning</div> For more information, see the Microsoft Power Automate Community forum post.

Use the @mention control to start or continue a discussion within the following areas:

• A work item discussion or any rich-text field
• A pull request discussion
• Commit comments
• Changeset or shelveset comments

Identity search selection

When you leave a code comment in a pull request, enter @ to trigger the @mention people picker. From the people picker, you see a list of users you've recently mentioned. To do a directory search, choose a name or enter the name of the user you're looking for.

Warning

If you have permission to invite users to the organization, regardless of whether the Restrict invitations policy is disabled, you can @mention a user who isn't part of your organization. This action invites that user to your organization. For more information, see Restrict new user invitations from project and team administrators.

To filter the list, enter the user name or alias until you've found a match.

You can also use group mentions. Enter the name of a team or a security group, choose Search, and then select from the options listed.

To @mention a user you've never selected previously, continue to enter the entire name to do your search against the full directory.

Names of mentioned users appear in blue text. Choose the @mention link name to open the user's contact information. The contact information provides more context for why they were added to the conversation.

Note

Don't copy/paste @mention users from a previous comment. While the resulting formatting looks identical to a properly entered mention, it doesn't register as a true mention nor send an email notification.

Upon completion of your selection and text entry, your @mention user receives an email alerting them about the mention.

Use the @mention control in pull request discussions, commit comments, changeset comments, and shelveset comments.

Limited identities in search selection

In general, people pickers search and select any user or group added to an organization's Azure AD.

For organizations that manage their users and groups using Azure Active Directory (Azure AD), people pickers provide support for searching users and groups added to the Azure AD. For organizations that want to limit the search and selection to only those users and groups added to a specific project, they can do so by enabling the Limit user visibility and collaboration to specific projects preview feature for their organization.

Important

• The limited visibility features described in this section apply only to interactions through the web portal. With the REST APIs or azure devops CLI commands, project members can access the restricted data.
• Guest users who are members in the limited group with default access in Azure AD, can't search for users with the people picker. When the preview feature's turned off or when guest users aren't members of the limited group, guest users can search all Azure AD users, as expected.

When the Limit user visibility and collaboration to specific projects preview feature is enabled for an organization, the list of identities you can select from a people picker is limited in one of the following ways:

• Users added to the Project-Scoped Users group are only able to select from an identity list that contains users and groups added explicitly to the project they're connected to.
• If all project members are added to the Project-Scoped Users group, then people pickers are limited to only those users and groups added to the project. All project members can only select identities that match users and groups added explicitly to the project they're connected to.

Warning

When the Limit user visibility and collaboration to specific projects preview feature is enabled for the organization, project-scoped users are unable to search for users who were added to the organization through Azure Active Directory group membership, rather than through an explicit user invitation. This is an unexpected behavior and a resolution is being worked on. To self-resolve this issue, disable the Limit user visibility and collaboration to specific projects preview feature for the organization.

Related articles

• Work item form controls
• Pull requests