Question

I have a TFS 2010 Work Item Type with a custom field called “Requested By.” This field can be populated with any name, but since most of the requests come from project developers throughout the organization, the SUGGESTEDVALUES property should populate the dropdown list with members of any TFS team project.

I have tried various values for SUGGESTEDVALUES, but both Collection\ Project Collection Valid Users and Server\ Team Foundation Valid Users seem to return every valid Active Directory account—well over 10,000 names.

I recognize that one option is to add an ALLOWEDVALUES item with multiple LISTITEM entries for Project\ Contributors for every team project, but with more than 150 team projects in the organization, this would be time-consuming initially and challenging to manage in the future.

Is there any easy way to populate the drop-down with TFS valid users who have actually been assigned to any team project in the collection, and exclude “Valid” users who exist in Active Directory but have never been assigned to a project?

Answer 1

Project Collection Valid Users is the correct group to use, and I have entered it correctly.

However, one project team wanted to make their code available to the entire organization, and added ORG\Domain Users to the [Project]\Readers group. This was discovered by running a full audit with TFS Projects based on a hunch that something like that must have happened.

Having answered this question with “because a project team was doin’ it wrong,” I have posted a follow-up question to find out how to correctly grant all valid TFS users access to a specific project. See How can I grant Team Project access to all Project Collection Users? for the discussion on (hopefully) doing this “the right way.”