Deleting work items in the Eclipse 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; and, 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, open the project area and click the Process Configuration tab. Expand Team Configuration and click Permissions. In the Permitted actions pane, expand Work Items and click Delete Work Item (server). 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 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 in the Eclipse client:
    1. Open a work item in the Eclipse 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, see Deleting work items in the web client.

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.