Agile Central: Use Templates to set Default Value to a drop-down field

Products

• CA Agile Central On Premise (Rally)
• CA Agile Central SaaS (Rally)

Issue/Introduction

How can I make one of the field's drop-down values to be a default so it's set to that field if no manual selection made?

Fields of type drop-down do not offer a default value. You can see that if you edit your field on either workspace or project level.
By default a 'No-Entry' selection is shown. This will require a user to manually select a value each time for that field.

You can use our Templates (currently in closed beta) feature to set default values to your artifact fields. That includes custom fields and also drop-downs.
You can learn more about Templates here: Work Item Templates help page

This document is a step-by-step walkthrough how to use Templates to create a default value to a drop-down custom field.

We will create a defect (“Sagi Template”) where we'll set a few fields, including a drop-down field. We shall select a value to the drop-down. This template will then become our basis for creating other/new defects where its values be set as defaults including the drop-down value.

Environment

Release:
Component: ACSAAS

Resolution

• Setup
• Create the Template
• Apply the Template

Setup

We create a defect, (call it: "Sagi Template").

In our template we'll set a default value to the User Story. Also, we shall set a default value to our custom drop-down field.
We have a custom drop-down field named: "Sagi_Test_SingleValued". This drop-down has 4 values (Value1,Value2,Value3,Value4). When creating the artifact (in this example a Defect) without the template it will default to 'No-Entry' , see here:  

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The field values are in the drop-down, as you see:

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We will create a Defect named: Sagi Template. We will set the User Story field with the value of the user story we need. Also, we shall select Value3 to be our default value for our drop-down custom field, see here:

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Click Create and to create this defect. And you can find it listed as part of your other defects:

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Create the Template

1. To create a Template off of this defect, let's open the defect and click Templates:

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The Templates window opens up.

2. In that window click on “New Template from DE18” (which is our defect in this example).

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3. Choose your field values.

A window opens up where you see suggested fields for this template. This suggestion is based on this defect's fields that are set with a value. This window is meant for you to pick and choose which of these fields to include in your template. Many of these fields you may not want to include, you will need to click the "x" button to the left of these fields to exclude from your template. 

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For our template we demonstrate here we kept ScheduleState, SubmittedBy and we kept our drop-down custom field with the preset "Value3".
 
4. In this window, designate a scope for your template. You can choose between "Me", "Project", "Workspace" whereas the first option will make this template available to you only, the second to all defects in this project, the last for all defect part of this workspace. 

 

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5. Make certain you name your template (in this example we named it: SagiTemplateValue3). Then, click Add. 

Here is our template (Both Color and Name fields should not be part of this, they can be removed per above instructions like all other fields):

<Please see attached file for image>

After clicking 'Add', we will see our created template in the window (again, notice # of fields indicates '5', because these screen shots include Color and Name , a total of 5 fields as you see in above screen shot - if we removed them it will be 3):

<Please see attached file for image>

You are set and ready to use your template.

Apply the Template

To use this template:

1. Create a new Defect
2. Click Templates
3. Select that template from the list of available templates
4. Click Apply

 
At that point you shall see your Defect has all values already set based on this template, including the selected value of the drop-down field (being set to Value3 as in our example).
 
Tip:
You can create many templates. When used they will populate the fields they have preset in their definitions. You may want to make certain you name your template accurately so that the populated fields are what you expect them to be.

Additional Information

NOTE: This process can be used for virtually ANY artifact or work item field in Rally where the customer desires to have a certain field choice as the default when creating new artifacts or work items.