What If…You delete a work item field ?

Recently I was doing some work on Work Items. I had to remove a field from a Work Item and wondered what would happen with History etc..

In this blog post I describe the things that happen if you delete a field from a Work Item Type Definition.

For this post I added a Field “Test.TemporaryField” to a Bug Work Item.

I added the field to the form and saved 3 revisions of the Bug.

This reflects in the history as expected.

Then I remove the field from the Work Item Type. Of course I removed it from the form first.

But then….

I hoped that the history would still contain the field, but the history only shows fields that are currently available on the work item.

But in the Tfs_Warehouse all history is still preserved

And then as a final test, I re-added the field to the bug. Magically, all history pops up again. Obviously it was not deleted at all..

Hope this saves you a lot of uncertainty…