Rosario: Querying on Links

The enhanced query builder in Rosario offers the ability to query on links. This gives you the ability to ask the system questions like:

· Give me all the Scenarios and any Bugs that might be linked to them.

· Give me only the Scenarios that have Bugs linked to them

· Give me only the Scenarios that don’t have any Bugs linked to them

And finally,

· Give me a Scenario, and recursively give me the tree of child Tasks below them.

The query builder allows all of these. To query on links, you first select the “Query on links” checkbox from the query builder view.

You will now see three panes

· The top one (the one you’ve always worked with) allows you to specify the main list work items. In the examples above, it relates to “Give me the Scenarios…”

· The middle one refers to what type of links you want to query on. Since work items can be linked together via different link types (Parent/Child, Related, Predecessor/Successor), you can filter on what type of link relationship to include. Default is “[Any]”, or All link types.

· The bottom pane refers to the filter on the linked items. In the above examples, it would relate to the “Bugs” or “Tasks” part of the scenario.

The query type defines how you want the query to return the information. You have the following choices:

· “All” – Return all items matching the main query (top query pane), and all linked items matching the bottom pane.
Example: Give me all the Scenarios and any Bugs that might be linked to them.

· “Must have” – Return only the items matching the main query that have links to items matching the bottom query.
Example: Give me only the Scenarios that have Bugs linked to them

· “Must not have” – Return only items matching the main query that DO NOT have links to items matching the bottom query
Example: Give me only the Scenarios that don’t have any Bugs linked to them

· “Tree” – Recursively return all children of the items in the main query.
Example: Give me a Scenario, and recursively give me the tree of child Tasks below them

Hope this helps to make sense of this. Let us know what you think!