It has been an exciting time with the Beta 1 release of the Scrum for Team System 3.0 process template. I’ve had a great couple of months working in the SfTS team where each day something new has been learnt, ranging from the technical (lots of new toys of the MS SQL 2008 and VS 2010 variety to play with), the surreal, right through to communicating more effectively (for full attention from the team, prefix sentence with ‘Anyone want a tea?’).
For more information about what’s included in the new template have a read of Simon Bennetts 3.0 from 30,000 feet blog or if you’re interested in participating in the Beta 1 Version 3.0 programme click here for details.
My main involvement has been working on the creation of the reports for the new template, one of the results has been discovering (read stomach churning moment) how the dimension table DIMdate is first created and populated in the tfs_warehouse.
Currently the DIMdate table is being used in the queries behind the Sprint reports to populate the dates, to include/exclude weekends etc. Imagine my “surprise” when first testing these reports against an imported test project and they kept on resolutely telling me no data existed, so after a bit of debugging discovered the issue was arising from the DIMdate table.
When the tfs_warehouse is created during the install of TFS*, the DIMdate table is built populated with a default date value range starting from the date the database was created to four months in the future. The problem experienced above was due to my imported project test data date values predating the DIMdate tables values.
Luckily the Dimdate table can be populated pretty easily after being instructed which date it should start from or end with.
In the tfs_warehouse there is a table called _PropertyBag, within this table set the Property_Value(s) (e.g. ‘2009-07-28T00:00:00’)for the Property_Key(s): ‘/Adapter/Config/CommonStructureService/DimDate/EndDenseDate’ (- postdating) ‘/Adapter/Config/CommonStructureService/DimDate/StartDenseDate’ (- predating)
After the Property_Value has been set, run the warehouse process which will pick up the new date value and presto on process completion the DIMdate table is populated with desired dates and in my case the imported test projects Sprint reports spring into action.
A 30 second change which took far too long to find, so hopefully this will spare someone else that heartache.
*TFS 2010 Beta 1, so this could all change
So until I find my next trip hazard,
Kate