Mapping Dates Between Quality Center and CA Agile Central

Products

• Rally On-Premise
• Rally SaaS

Issue/Introduction

Quality Center has a set of date fields for artifacts where the format is a string composed of a date, but equivalent fields in Rally may be in a string composed of date and time.

There are two field handlers which facilitate this movement of date fields, namely <QCDatetimeToDateFieldHandler> and <RallyDateTimeFieldHandler>.

Cause

Symptom:

• The test Run Execution date when copy into Rally always shows a different date?randomly (Year, Month or Day)

Resolution

We recommend using this field handler for the following standard Quality Center mapping fields:

 

• BG_CLOSING_DATE
• BG_DETECTION_DATE
• RQ_REQ_DATE
• TS_CREATION_DATE

An example configuration file snippet for date mapping:

<Config>....<Connector><FieldMapping><Field> <Rally>CreationDate</Rally> <Other>BG_DETECTION_DATE</Other> <Direction>TO_OTHER</Direction></Field>....<OtherFieldHandlers><QCDatetimeToDateFieldHandler> <FieldName>BG_DETECTION_DATE</FieldName></QCDatetimeToDateFieldHandler>....

In Rally, the CreationDate is a read-only field. It is on an artifact, put there by the underlying database and therefore the user can not modify this field. In the example above, we have placed a <Direction> tag. While the tag is not actually required in this instance, we use it to reinforce the fact that this field can never be modified by the user in Rally. If a configuration file maps into this Rally field, it will be silently ignored (no data is copied or updated in this Rally field).

When doing bi-directional movements of date fields, use both field handlers as in the following example:

<Config>....<Connector> <FieldMapping> <Field> <Rally>Name</Rally> <Other>BG_SUMMARY</Other> </Field> <Field> <Rally>TargetDate</Rally> <Other>BG_CLOSING_DATE</Other> </Field> </FieldMapping> <OtherFieldHandlers> <QCDatetimeToDateFieldHandler> <FieldName>BG_CLOSING_DATE</FieldName> </QCDatetimeToDateFieldHandler> </OtherFieldHandlers> <RallyFieldHandlers> <RallyDateTimeFieldHandler> <FieldName>TargetDate</FieldName> <!-- TargetDate(2012-08-25T06:00:00.000Z) --> <DateTimeFormat>%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S.%LZ</DateTimeFormat> </RallyDateTimeFieldHandler> </RallyFieldHandlers></Connector>....