Deleting work items in the web client

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To remove most traces of information contained in and related to a work item, you can delete one or many work items, but this action must be taken with caution. Deleting work items impacts traceability and can also impact many related artifacts.

Before you begin

To delete work items, you must be a member of the JazzAdmins or the JazzProjectAdmins repository group. Additionally, in the project area or team area, you must be assigned a role that has permission to delete a work item. To configure delete permissions, you first must enable the property in the server administration page. In your Server Administration, select Advanced Properties. Locate the Use role-based permissions to delete a work item property and change the value to true:

Next, open the project area in the administrative web interface. In the pane, click Permissions. In the Permitted Actions pane, expand Work Items and click Delete Work Item. By default, this property is not enabled. Click Save:

Permitted actions section of Project Area or Team Area editor with Work items expanded, Delete work item expanded, and Delete a work item selected.

If you do not have these permissions, the Delete buttons do not appear as indicated in the following steps.

For more information on permissions, see Permissions and Modifying permissions.

About this task

You might need to permanently remove information that was stored in a work item from a repository. For example, if sensitive information was entered in a comment, description, attachment, etc., which you no longer want to store in the related repository, then you can delete the relevant work items. Manual cleanup of repository data is necessary after deletion.

Deleting work items can impact all artifacts that are related to that work item, including dependent artifacts, attachments, change sets, and reports. References made to the work items in other work items' discussions and comments are not removed, but these links to the work items will reference a deleted work item, which will not open.

Procedure

You can delete individual work items using either the Eclipse client or the web client, or you can delete multiple work items at the same time using the web client.

To delete a single work item:
1. Open a work item in the web client.
2. Click the Delete button in the work item editor toolbar.
  If the Delete button does not appear, refer to the prerequisites in this topic.
To delete multiple work items at the same time:
1. In the web client, run a query that includes all the work items that you want to delete.
2. In the query results view, click the Edit Multiple Work Items button in the toolbar.
3. Select all the work items that you want to delete by clicking the check box next to each one or select all the work items in the query results by clicking the Select/Deselect all check box in the results header row.
4. Click the Delete Work Items button in the Edit Multiple Work Items box.
  If the Delete button does not appear, refer to the prerequisites in this topic.

Results

Once deleted, a work item will no longer appear or be referenced in almost all contexts. A reference to deleted work items might appear in local history in the Team Artifacts view or a locally-cached change event feed, but if a user attempts to open the work item, a message is displayed indicating that the work item has been deleted.

What to do next

After one or more work items are deleted, attachments are deleted as well as links to deleted work items. This should be done automatically, but you should manually verify success of the deletions.