Mass Edit

The Mass Edit feature lets users update multiple items, or properties/fields of multiple items (in the same tracker), parallelly.

Initiating Mass Edit

To start a Mass Edit, select one or more items in the tracker (table) view and then choose Mass Edit... from the more menu:

After pressing the Mass Edit... option a dialog box is shown, where users can select the fields to be updated from the More... selector. Only fields are displayed where Edit permission is granted in the current status of each selected item.

Mass Edit dialog

The Mass Edit dialog box consists of two main parts. The body of the dialog box contain one ore more field updates. At the bottom of the dialog box there are function buttons.

Saving the changes executes the operation immediately. It is also possible to create a baseline during the mass edit operation:

Setting Field updates

For each selected field, you can choose, whether to

• Set to or
• Clear

the value of this field.

Depending on the field type, there are also additional type specific operations.

Text and Wiki fields also support to

• Prepend or
• Append

a value to the existing value (with an optional separator).

Numeric and Duration fields also support to

• Increment or
• Decrement

the existing value by the specified value.
In other words Add or Substract the specified value to/from the existing field value.

Multiple Choice fields also support to

• Add
• Remove

the specified value(s) to/from the existing field value(s), or to

• Retain

only those existing field values that are contained in the specified (collection of) values.
In other words, removes those existing values, that are not contained in the specified (collection of) values.


The value(s) to apply can be

• (a constant) Value, that you can enter/select via the appropriate value editor, or
• the Result of evaluating an expression, that computes/calculates the value (see Computed Fields).

For example: Compute the new value for End Date by shifting the existing End Date 3 hours into the future, because we had to reconsider (increase) the Planned Effort.




To Edit a field to update, you can:

• Click the field value you want to change/edit.
• Click on the small pencil behind the field value you want to change/edit.

To Remove a field to update:

• Click on the x icon after the name of the field you want to remove.

Please make sure, that you have committed all open field value editors with OK, before you start the batch update by OK on the dialog, otherwise the uncommitted editor values will get lost.

In CB-7.9.2 and newer, you can also apply multiple value update operations on fields, that allow multiple values.

For example:

• Assign the item to all Owners, except those having role Tester
  • Assigned to: Set to content of Owner, Remove Tester
• Assign the item to all Owners, plus user bond
  • Assigned to: Set to content of Owner, Add bond
• Remove all assignees in role Developer and newly assign users in role Tester
  • Assigned to: Remove Developer, Add Tester

There can be also constellations with three or more operations, e.g.

• Assign the item to all Owners, that have the role Administrator, except members of group System Admin
  • Assigned to: Set to content of Owner, Retain Administrator, Remove System Admin

To add additional field value update operations, click on the More... button of the field update editor.





To Remove additional field value update operations:

• Click on the x icon of the field value update operation, you want to remove.

Because the order of operations is significant, you can re-order additional field value update operations via drag-and-drop (in edit mode).

Relationship with New Baseline workflow action

New Baseline workflow action creates a baseline, when some transition occurs. During a mass edit operation the semantics of this workflow action is different. The workflow action itself is not executed, the user instead has to create the baseline manually with the mass edit dialog.

Settings for this workflow action:

Mass edit operation in this Tracker:

Configuration

In CB-21.09 and newer, you can configure Mass Edit via the section massEdit in System Admin → Application Configuration:

For example, the default configuration is the following:

...
},
"massEdit" : {
    "disableCheckMandatoryFieldsCheckbox" : false,
    "enabled" : true,
    "showResults" : null,
    "showResultsDefault" : false
},
...

If no massEdit configuration is present, the defaults are as shown in the example above.

• enabled (boolean, default value: true) – Determines whether the Mass Edit feature is enabled (true) or disabled (false).
• showResults (boolean, default value: null) – Determines whether Mass Edit results are processed either:
  • individually (in separate transactions) and shown separately (true),
  • together (in a single transaction) without the results shown separately (false), or
  • based on user preference (that can be either of the above two) set for each Mass Edit operation interactively (null).
• showResultsDefault (boolean, default value: false) – Is only used if showResults is null, and defines the default value of the Show Mass Edit Results (true or false).
• disableCheckMandatoryFieldsCheckbox (boolean, default value: false) – Determines whether the Check mandatory fields during Mass Editcheckbox is displayed:
  • If set to false - there is a checkbox that is initially selected. This can be deselected if the user intends to skip the check for mandatory fields. In this case, all modifications take place irrespective of missing values, for example.
    
    
  • If set to true - there is no checkbox, and mandatory fields are always checked.

Effects of the configuration parameters

This section provides a detalied explanation of the configuration parameters of the Mass Edit feature, described above.

1st case

In this case, the Check mandatory fields during Mass Edit and Show Mass Edit Results checkboxes are true:

After configuring the Mass Edit transaction and pressing Save, the following pop-up window shows the results of the process:

Setting the the Failed only checkbox to false all the transactions (both successful and unsuccessful) are listed. Next to the Result column the rule by which the given transaction failed is shown (in this example: MissingMandatoryFieldException, indicating that a mandatory field is missing a value).

By clicking the rule, a pop-up window shows which mandatory field(s) caused the failure, so users can fix the problem and re-run the Mass Edit on the given Tracker Items:

2nd case

In this case, the Check mandatory fields during Mass Edit checkbox is ture and the Show Mass Edit Results checkbox is false:

With this configuration, the results window is not displayed after finishing the Mass Edit. If there are any mandatory fields missing values, a pop-up window shows which fields are missing (though without showing the Tracker Item concerned):

3rd case

In this case, the Check mandatory fields during Mass Edit checkbox is false and the Show Mass Edit Results checkbox is true :

After configuring the Mass Edit transaction and pressing Save, the following pop-up window shows the results of the process:

4th case

In this case, the disableCheckMandatoryFieldsCheckbox parameter (in System Admin → Application Configuration ) is true. This means that the user has no control over whether the check for mandatory fields is enabled or disabled, it runs every time by default.

The Show Mass Edit Results checkbox has the same effect as described in previous sections.