Rally Kanban - hiding Epic Stories

Question

Is there a way to hide epic stories (i.e. stories with children) from Rally's kanban board app (presumably by customizing the kanban "catalog app" code to be a custom app)?

I found the part of the kanban javascript app code where it sets up a query depending on whether stories "allocated to a release" are hidden (and I'd added another checkbox into the settings to control the showing / hiding of epic stories), but haven't had any success modifying the query to exclude stories that have children. (Whether or not the query can be modified, or whether the cards need to be filtered after fetching the query results, I'm not sure).

Answer 1

Unfortunately for now this is unsupported by our WSAPI. Being able to filter by collection count is one of the more requested features however- (Children.Count = 0) or something similar would be awesome.

There is one app in the catalog that does prevent epics from showing up on a board- Estimation Board. It is entirely manual though. Data is queried first with Children included in the fetch and any items with Children are filtered out of the results on the client side before being passed to the CardBoard component. There are also performance issues to consider when pulling back this additional volume of data.

Answer 2

You cannot filter data based upon the qualities of items in collections it contains. For example you could not return Stories with no children or defects. You could filter change the query to return the children of the stories if you wanted. This would enable you to filter the stories in memory on the browser side.

There are a few issues with this plan that kept me from filtering them when we wrote the Kanban App. If the the first page of stories returned contained entirely epics for one of the columns queries you would end up with a column with no data in it even if further down rank you had leaf stories that you would of been shown.

The second issue is that due to the Rally's WSAPI ability to fetch fields semi-recursively each child object can be rather large. Some of our customers have a single epic with many many children I didn't want to chance the lack of responsiveness for those customers.

If you are comfortable with this issues on your personal version of our Kanban board you can just listen to the onDataRetrieved event and filter out your unwanted stories.

Internally we are very aware of the annoyances that this causes and we are working to find a good general solution to this issue.

If we release one I will dig this post back up and make sure the new solution is explained.