Wednesday, February 28, 2007

How work item permissions affect query results

Today I come across interesting article (well, it is only paragraph worth of text) - in MSDN of all places. Reading that short one in time could have saved me several hours :)

The gist of the thing is this - if you have set permissions to on area paths (deny "View work items in this node"), then you may be in for surprise, as that permission will affect work item query results. If you think about it - that's only logical if the person that has no permissions do not see the forbidden work items.

But if you use those permissions, you should explain that aspect of the behavior to every user, as it may lead to rather unpleasant explanations ("I saw in my report only five bugs and now you tell me there are fifty!"). That makes me wonder - would the indication of restricted work items visible in reports (perhaps similar to indication of restricted branches in item properties in version control) make the situation better?

At any rate - if you as much as think about changing the area path view work item permissions, read the article before and think again! As MSDN small print says "... the system does not warn the user the query results are incomplete ..."

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