Blog Post: Azure Pipelines Related Work Items Monorepo

_posts/2024-08-28-azure-devops-pipelines-related-work-items-monorepo.md

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+---
+published: true
+layout: post
+title: "Getting the related work items for an Azure Pipeline run in a monorepo"
+description:
+  Azure pipelines 'Related Work Items' feature doesn't support monorepos...
+  let's find a solution!
+modified: 2024-08-28
+tags:
+  - PowerShell
+  - Azure DevOps
+categories:
+  - DevOps
+---
+
+## The problem..
+
+I absolutely love this little ['related work items'](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/pipelines/process/environments?view=azure-devops#view-deployment-history)
+feature in Azure DevOps pipelines:
+
+{% include image.html path="related-work-items-button.png" %}
+
+You can click on it and quickly get a view of the work items associated with that pipeline:
+
+{% include image.html path="related-work-items-view.png" %}
+
+This information is beneficial in two ways:
+
+1. It is useful information for the person running a deployment
+2. It can be used via ADO APIs to block deployments if related stories are in a certain status
+
+So... what's the problem with this feature?
+
+It doesn't support monorepos 😭😭😭
+
+## What happens with monorepos?
+
+Let's say I have a repository set up with the following folder structure and two azure pipelines files:
+
+{% include image.html path="the-setup.png" %}
+
+Then let's say I commit to the main branch twice. Each commit adds a single `index.js` file to
+each folder:
+
+{% include image.html path="the-work.png" %}
+
+Each of those files trigger their own build runs. When I view the related work items for each though.. this happens:
+
+{% include image.html path="the-problem.png" %}
+
+## Does Microsoft plan to add monorepo support?
+
+No... even though I'd think there would be plenty of support for this,
+the idea has never gotten any [traction](https://stackoverflow.com/a/68729663/3317144).
+
+## Let's find a solution
+
+It appears from the Azure DevOps REST API documentation that we should be able to do this ourselves...
+**IF** we are associating work items to our commits (via PR or otherwise). Which I so happen to be
+doint already so the following method looks pretty promising:
+
+1. Get ALL the commits related to a build pipeline via the [Get Build Changes](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/rest/api/azure/devops/build/builds/get-build-changes?view=azure-devops-rest-7.1) endpoint.
+2. Filter those commits down to the ones we want using the [Get Commits](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/rest/api/azure/devops/git/commits/get-commits?view=azure-devops-rest-7.1&tabs=HTTP) endpoint using:
+   1. `searchCriteria.itemPath` - to exclude commits that aren't in our trigger
+   2. `searchCriteria.includeWorkItems` - to include the work items associated with the commits
+3. Pull the work item ids from Step #2 to do whatever I want with
+
+### PowerShell time!
+
+Following the above strategy I wrote up a quick PowerShell script (gist to keep up to date) that seems to get me everything I need:
+
+<script src="https://gist.github.com/Tiberriver256/99452a6bd254327acceb0405e34d2230.js"></script>