Work item links (#1234) inside HTML-Fields like description, acceptance criteria, comments do NOT work constantly

[ndeeH]

Describe your issue:

Normal links between work items seem to work correctly.
But we have also links in the description, acceptance criteria or comments embedded.
These embedded links in html fields seem NOT to work on initial migration.

Describe any Exceptions:

When changing the content of one of the html fields containing links this migration of embedded links works.
So there seems to be a chance to fix it!

Source / Target Details

• Azure DevOps Services
• Source Language: Eng

runs.log

configuration.json.txt

@michael-buchner FYI

[MrHinsh]

This realtes to #1246 and is something that we currently have no solution for. Links are migrated only when both the SourceWI and the Target WI have been migrated. When your first work items migrated no links are added.

Question: Would you want the targetWi of the link to be edited at the same time as the sourcewi link is added? This would result in an additional edit...

[ndeeH]

All Source Links already exist (in descriptions, etc) and are not added laterly. So we would have to touch the Source work items after an import of all relevant items to get the embedded links migrated.
My question is why other links get converted on the initial migration in a later step and why this can not happen for embedded links.

@michael-buchner FYI

[MrHinsh]

Links are migrated as the work items exist.

If WiA links to WiB then the link is added when WiB is migrated and ignored when WiA is migrated, as WiB does not exist yet.

If this was an embedded link in WiA as well then when we process WiA the WiB does not exist and we cant update it. When we do process WiB we don't have access to WiA when we process WiB.

Help Us make the tool better

If you would like to create a PR to add additional logic post-processor to run through and re-edit those fields, that would be welcome.

Something to consider:

• We cant edit the history and thus any "comments" would not be able to be edited. They can only be changed at initial save time, when the target of the link may not yet exist.
• This will be an additional edit over the top of the existing description or other text field.