Reflect the rename of a state for the Bug Work Item

The bug work item has 3 (Agile: Active, Resolved, Closed) or 4 states (CMMI: Proposed, Active, Resolved, Closed). Those states are used also in the reporting. When you rename the state, it is not automatically picked up by the reporting. Luckily Microsoft has foreseen that not everybody uses the same name for states and introduced a parameter.

To reflect the new state name in the report (in this post, I assume that you have renamed the state Active to Assigned), you have to change the value of the parameter. You can do that by following these steps (I use SQL Server 2008 R2):

1. Go to the report site for the team project (you can find that by right clicking the Reports node in the team explorer)
   
   
   
2. It will lead you to the following site
   
   
   
3. Click on the Bugs. It will open all the reports that are in the Bugs folder
4. Now hover over the Bug Status report and click on the triangle that pops up. This will open a menu of actions you can perform on the report
   
   
   
5. Choose the Manage action, which leads to the following page
   
   
   
6. Click on the Parameters section (on the left side). You will see the parameters that are specified in the report including there default values
   
    
   
7. In the list is also the parameter ActiveName, which defines the name of the state Active.
8. Because we changed the Active state to Assigned, you have to change the Default Value to “Assigned”.
9. Now scroll down until you see at the bottom the Apply button (don’t forget that one!!)
10. The report will now pick up the new state. However there is a little bug in the report. There is one location in which the “Active” state is still hard coded.
11. Go back to the action menu that you saw in step 4 and now choose the Download action.
12. Download it to your local harddrive.
13. Open the rdl file in notepad.
14. Replace all occurrences of “Active” (including quotes) with the value Parameters!ActiveName.Value
15. Save the changes and go to the page you see in step 5
16. Now choose the Replace action and choose the local file
    
    
    
17. And press OK.