Necessary Customizations when changing Query Names in TFS Process Template

The reasons for me customizing the Product Planning Workbook can be found in the blog post called Customizing the Agile Workbooks

What I wanted to do was to change the query folders and query names in our process template. We wanted to have just a few necessary queries and make sure people used them instead of having a lot of queries where it is hard to find the ones that you need. So when I renamed the folder Iteration 1 to Current Iteration and got rid of the folders Iteration 2 and Iteration 3 I thought it was going to be fine. Our query structure now looks like this:

However I ended up with some problems with the Iteration Backlog workbook. When trying to upload the process template and create a new project I got an error. The “Iteration 1/Iteration backlog” query was not found. So this was because I renamed the Query folder to Current Iteration. So where can you change this? Since the workbooks reside in the Documents folder they are actually stored in Sharepoint. So my first place to look was in the Windows Sharepoint Services folder of the process template. The WssTasks.XML file seems to be the configuration file that controls the creation of the portal and then also the “binding” of the Agile workbooks to the newly created project. I have to admit I was a bit scared that the customization of this had to be done in code in some of the Tasks for creating the portal, but I did not have to worry. In the WssTasks.XML file I found the node <files> and under that a row that defines the file Iteration Backlog. And in that definition there is a pointer to the Query. So I just had to change to the correct folder name – and it all worked just fine!

<file
source=“Windows SharePoint Services\Shared Documents\Project Management\Iteration Backlog.xlsm“
documentLibrary=“Shared Documents“
target=“Current Iteration/Iteration Backlog.xlsm“
queryId=“Current Iteration/Iteration Backlog“ />

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