Rally Software

I would like a view that shows all the user stories in all the features in an initiative.  I can't figure out how to structure this query.

Hey SteveAppling1363154, the problem here is that you run into some difficulties when trying to traverse up to the parent of a parent, in this case an Initiative. 

You might take a look at this Github repository, which has an app that does exactly that and might be a good starting point!

While this app does list a column for Features and Initiatives, it doesn't seem to allow me to either sort or filter by Initiative, it just lists the initiatives for stories that have one.  I'm not sure how to use this to just list the stories for a single initiative.

I would think this would be a very common need.  Is there really no way to do this without writing my own app?

Steve, usually folks aren't as interested as getting so granular in their view from the Initiative level - that's why there's not an app for this kind of view in the App Catalog. Please feel free to branch that code linked above and put together your own app, or post your own idea at https://ideas.rallydev.com!

Actually in this case it's achievable. The query for a Custom List of user stories is just:

(PortfolioItem.Parent.FormattedID = "I1234")

Where I1234 if the formatted ID of the subject initiative. Hope that helps!

Wow EricNash thanks for that - I didn't know how to (or that you could) traverse up that way! Awesome!

That's as far as you can go up the hierarchy John. You can get to the grandparent but not the great-grandparent (e.g. Theme), at least not with a simple query string.

Thanks for the suggestion, Eric.  Unfortunately, this only seems to show user stories that are direct descendants of the Feature.  If any of these stories are split, then their children don't show up.  Do you have any thoughts about how to get all their descendants too? 

If you use (Feature.Parent.FormattedID = "I1234") instead that should give you all stories for the initiative, including the child stories of the split parent.  If you only want the leaf node stories, and NOT the parent that was split, you could used ((Feature.Parent.FormattedID = "I1234") AND (DirectChildrenCount = 0))

Thanks for the idea, but this doesn't seem to work either.  I tried using "(Feature.Parent.FormattedID = "I203")", but it does not seem to actually filter anything out.

I have never been clear on how to tell what fields are available for making these types of advanced queries.  I see lots of examples in the help, but not clear guidance on what the actual fields are.  Is there a way to view the actual fields available on a particular item (for example a story) so that I can more intelligently try to structure some of these queries?

In this case, I'm not clear on the distinction between using PortfolioItem or the Feature fields.

Interesting...I did test it and was able to get it work consistently so my guess is there is something amiss with your query (although, typically you would get an error, not all results returned).  Is your lowest level portfolio item type called "Feature"?  And Initiative is your second level?

I tend to use the wsapi doc to see the full object model: https://rally1.rallydev.com/slm/doc/webservice/ 

You can use dot notation to query attributes of related objects, e.g. Feature is an attribute of "HierarchicalRequirement" which is the object name for a user story, and feature is itself an object with attributes so for stories you can do queries on attributes such as Feature.Name, Feature.FormattedID.  And remember that objects inherit attributes from their parent so you can use those attributes too.

The data model gets interesting with Portfolio Items since you can define your own portfolio item hierarchy and query each separately.  I was actually surprised that PortfolioItem.Parent worked in the story query but happy to know that it did (I learned something new!).

This is actually working.  I was confused because it displayed some stories with a completely wrong release.  After looking more closely, these stories were actually misconfigured.  They are part of one initiative, but are assigned to a release from a previously completed project.  This is exactly the type of problem I was hoping to uncover with this view.  Thank you for your help.

This is absolutely awesome to hear! Glad you were able to get something that works Steve ! Thanks so much Julie!

Steve would you mind marking whichever response helped you the most as the correct answer? That way others trying to do the same thing will be able to find it in the future! Thanks!!