Can I Populate a TFS Dropdown with Project Members Only?

Question

I have a TFS 2010 Work Item Type with a custom field called "Requested By." This field can be populated with any name, but since most of the requests come from project developers throughout the organization, the SUGGESTEDVALUES property should populate the dropdown list with members of any TFS team project.

I have tried various values for SUGGESTEDVALUES, but both Collection\ Project Collection Valid Users and Server\ Team Foundation Valid Users seem to return every valid Active Directory account—well over 10,000 names.

I recognize that one option is to add an ALLOWEDVALUES item with multiple LISTITEM entries for Project\ Contributors for every team project, but with more than 150 team projects in the organization, this would be time-consuming initially and challenging to manage in the future.

Is there any easy way to populate the drop-down with TFS valid users who have actually been assigned to any team project in the collection, and exclude "Valid" users who exist in Active Directory but have never been assigned to a project?

Just to reiterate & clarify: I do not want the list to contain project members for a specific project; I want the list to contain project members for *all* team projects in the collection. The custom work item type belongs to a team project which receives requests from internal developers who are members of other team projects in our collection. — Boris Nikolaevich, Mar 26 '12 at 21:05

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Mar 26 '12 at 23:14

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What do you get if you use Project Collection Valid Users?

answered Mar 26 '12 at 23:14

HintonBR

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As mentioned in the post, I get about 10K results when I use Project Collection Valid Users (which is the current setting implemented by the previous developer who worked on the Service Request work item type). It seems like that should be exactly the setting I want; I'm not sure why it returns such a large result set and includes so many non-dev users as "valid." – Boris Nikolaevich Mar 27 '12 at 05:46
I am not sure why it is not clear from my question that I am already using the `Project Collection Valid Users` group, but that's what I have set, and it is giving me back 10,000 users. When I look at the membership of the group, it correctly includes all project groups. – Boris Nikolaevich Mar 27 '12 at 16:25

score 0 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 11:48

Project Collection Valid Users is the correct group to use, and I have entered it correctly.

However, one project team wanted to make their code available to the entire organization, and added ORG\Domain Users to the [Project]\Readers group. This was discovered by running a full audit with TFS Projects based on a hunch that something like that must have happened.

Having answered this question with "because a project team was doin' it wrong," I have posted a follow-up question to find out how to correctly grant all valid TFS users access to a specific project. See How can I grant Team Project access to all Project Collection Users? for the discussion on (hopefully) doing this "the right way."

Can I Populate a TFS Dropdown with Project Members Only?

2 Answers2