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Customizing How Work Items are Related through Link Types

  • Article

You can customize an existing link type or create a link type to meet your project tracking requirements. Link types are used to create relationships between work items. You may want to modify or create a link type for one of the following reasons:

  • Change the link labels that are used to match your team's naming conventions.

  • Add a link type to track a particular relationship that is unique to your team's process.

In addition, you can customize the work item type definition to accept or prohibit specific links based on link type. For more information, see Defining Link Controls to Restrict Link Relationships.

Common Tasks

Tasks

Related topics

Learn how link types are defined and used. You use a link type to define the link labels, topology type, and restrictions that are used when constructing links between work items. You can customize an existing link type or create a link type to meet your project tracking requirements.

Create a link type. The link type is specified in a type definition XML file that you import to a team project collection.

Title

Description

Understand what types of links support your project requirements. Before you start to create links between work items, you should analyze how you might use links to plan your project and track the status of work items.

List, deactivate, or reactivate link types. With the witadmin command-line utility, you can deactivate, delete, export, import, list, and reactivate link types.

Control the link options available on a work item form. You use the LinksControlOptions element to define the options that control what links can be added to a work item and to which work item types. Also, you can specify the default columns that you want to appear for the list of links in a work item.

See Also

Concepts

Customizing Project Tracking Data, Forms, Workflow, and Other Objects