Possible to fetch full hierarchical requirements in single portfolio item web service call? - rally

Question

I'm trying to aggregate some information about the kanban states of my user stories. If query a PifTeam item, I get a summarized collection of UserStories associated with it.
Example query:
https://rally1.rallydev.com/slm/webservice/1.40/portfolioitem/pifteam/99999999999.js
However I then have to run a loop on the UserStories collection, individually querying each one to get at the information I need. This potentially results in a lot of web service calls.
Is there a way to return the full hierarchical requirement information in the original pifteam query so that there is only one webservice call which returns all sub-objects? I read the webservice api and was trying to play with the fetch parameter but had no success.

Answer 1

This functionality will be disabled in WSAPI 2.0 but will continue to be available in the 1.x versions. That said, you should be able to use a fetch the fields on story that you need like this:
/pifteam/9999.js?fetch=UserStories,FormattedID,Name,PlanEstimate,KanbanState
Fetch will hydrate the fields specified on sub objects even if the root object type doesn't have those fields. So by fetching UserStories the returned collection will populated with stories, each having the FormattedID, Name, PlanEstimate and KanbanState fields included.

Answer 2

There is no way to do it from Rally's standard Web Services API (WSAPI) but you can from the new Lookback API (LBAPI). The query would look something like this:
https://rally1.rallydev.com/analytics/v2.0/service/rally/workspace/<ObjectID_for_Workspace>/artifact/snapshot/query.js?find={__At:"current",_TypeHierarchy:"HierarchicalRequirement",Children:null,_ItemHierarchy:<ObjectID_for_PortfolioItem>}&fields=["Name"]
Fill in the ObjectIDs for your Workspace and PortfolioItem. The _ItemHierarchy field will cross work item type boundaries and goes all the way from PortfolioItems down through the Story hierarchy down to Defects and even Tasks, so I added _TypeHierarchy:"HierarchicalRequirement" to limit it to Stories. I have specified Children:null which means you'll only get back leaf Stories. The __At:"current" clause get's the current tree and values. Remember, it's the "Lookback" API, so you can retrieve the state of the object at any moment in history. __At:"current" says to get the current values and tree.
Note, the LBAPI is delayed from current values in the system by anywhere from seconds to minutes. Typically it's about 30 seconds behind. You can see how far behind it is by checking the ETLDate field in the response.
Details about the LBAPI can be found here. Note, that the LBAPI is available in preview now for almost all Rally customers. There are still a number of customers where it is not yet turned on. The best way to tell if it's working for your subscription is to try the query.