Create document report from TFS data
After a while of working with TFS work item, a lot of
data is been assembled inside the TFS. This data can be access by the TFS quire
and even can be exported into Excel sheet, but what about exporting the data
into Word document?
There are a few tools in the market that you can use to
export the data to Word document but none of this tools will export the data
and will generate the report with the correct hierarchy format that will
represent the hierarchy of the data and will also will create the report using
a few general roles on the data.
With the great help of Lior Amsalem we created a project
which purpose is to auto generate documents that are related to any type of
data stored on the TFS. The documents can be tailored documents according to
TFS specific data, or standard reports that are required by regularity needs (
FDA, ISO or…), or internal company's development documents (STD, STR, Project
Plan…).
The project is based on a few layers
- DAL - The system is using a layer
that connects to TFS on top of the TFS APIs and handles all communication
and data retrieval from the TFS.
- BL - There is a reporting data
layer, that is responsible to build custom data structures according to
the reports we need.
- UI – The actual reports generation
is using OPEN XML SDKs in order to generate Any type of office documents
(Word, Excel…).
For example in one of the company that I advise for, they
MUST produce a document that describe the requirement from the product (for FDA
needs). They have dozens of work items that describe the product requirement,
in the past they have produce the document by hand (copy and paste of work item
data into word document) and it took them between 2-3 days with the hope that
no mistake was done in manual process.
For the purpose of automatic documentation generation we
have developed an infrastructure that can read a TFS quire “Report Product
Requirement”
and generate a word document with full hierarchy format
of the work items
The product requirement document was the simplest
document that was “Automatic generated”, we have also created a SRS(software
requirements specifications) and STM(software traceability matrix) which
involve also the Test runs results and test cases.
