This path is not anchored in the source project

[SukramAbAnvil]

Hi,

i want to migrate the workitem of a project including their revision (ReplayRevisions : true).
The problem is that some of the work items have been moved from another project using the "Move to team project" function.
So let's assume that I want to migrate "project A" and the items were moved from "project B".
Due to this fact I find in the history Area and Iteration Path starting with "Project B/".

This fact seems to lead to a "This path is not anchored in the source project" exception.
In my search for a solution I stumbled across the following stackoverflow post:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/72971072/this-path-is-not-anchored-in-the-source-project-name
The suggestion to use a mapping to solve the problem didn't work.

Any ideas?

Versions Info:
devopsmigration.exe" version devopsmigration 14.0.1+Branch.master.Sha.4cfec9e05545fc092821b32637f8de7e47673a19

[MrHinsh]

As per the documentation, you need to add Iteration Maps and Area Maps that adapt the old locations to new ones that are valid in the Target.

Before your migration starts it will validate that all of the Areas and Iterations from the Source work items revisions exist on the Target. Any that do not exist will be flagged in the logs and if you have "StopMigrationOnMissingAreaIterationNodes": true, set the migration will stop just after it outputs a list of the missing nodes.

Our algorithm that converts the Source nodes to Target nodes processes the mappings at that time. This means that any valid mapped nodes will never be caught by the This path is not anchored in the source project message as they are already altered to be valid.

We recently updated the logging for this part of the system to more easily debug both your mappings and to see what they system is doing with the nodes and their current state. You can set "LogLevel": "Debug" to see the details.

To add a mapping, you can follow the documentation with this being the simplest way:

"IterationMaps": {
  "WorkItemMovedFromProjectName\\\\Iteration 1": "TargetProject\\Sprint 1",
},
"AreaMaps": {
   "WorkItemMovedFromProjectName\\\\Team 2": "TargetProject\\ProductA\\Team 2",
}

Or you can use regular expressions to match the missing area or iteration paths:

"IterationMaps": {
  "^OriginalProject\\\\Path1(?=\\\\Sprint 2022)": "TargetProject\\AnotherPath\\NewTeam",
  "^OriginalProject\\\\Path1(?=\\\\Sprint 2020)": "TargetProject\\AnotherPath\\Archives\\Sprints 2020",
  "^OriginalProject\\\\Path2": "TargetProject\\YetAnotherPath\\Path2",
},
"AreaMaps": {
  "^OriginalProject\\\\(DescopeThis|DescopeThat)": "TargetProject\\Archive\\Descoped\\",
  "^OriginalProject\\\\(?!DescopeThis|DescopeThat)": "TargetProject\\NewArea\\",
}

If you want to use the matches in the replacement you can use the following:

"IterationMaps": {
  "^\\\\oldproject1(?:\\\\([^\\\\]+))?\\\\([^\\\\]+)$": "TargetProject\\Q1\$2",
}

If the olf iteration path was \oldproject1\Custom Reporting\Sprint 13, then this would result in a match for each Iteration node after the project node. You would then be able to reference any of the nodes using "$" and then the number of the match.

Regular expressions are much more difficult to build and debug so it is a good idea to use a regular expression tester to check that you are matching the right things and to build them in ChatGTP.

NOTE: You need \\ to escape a \ the pattern, and \\ to escape a \ in JSON. Therefor on the left of the match you need 4 \ to represent the \\ for the pattern and only 2 \ in the match