This blog describes the newest enhancement in the tasks API and Excel upload which allows you to easily bring the external content into Cloud ALM and to effectively track and report on this content.
We frequently have our customers and partners bringing their own content into Cloud ALM either via APIs or through excel upload to manage them as project items. Once the external content is imported to Cloud ALM, the key challenge has been tracking and reporting of these items.
The latest enhancement offers a dedicated source and external reference fields in the tasks API and create/update excel, making it simpler to manage and report on the external content. A combination of these attributes, can be used to:
- identify the external content in a Cloud ALM Project
- maintain link to the external source
What is offered?
- A new Source type called ‘External’
- New External reference attributes: External Reference Name, External Reference Id, External Reference URL
How to use it?
When importing the content to Cloud ALM, either via the API or excel, you can use both Source and the External Reference attributes together.
1. The Source attribute offers a fixed value ‘External’ which can be used to identify where the content originated from. We recommend setting the Source value as ‘External’ because you can easily filter the content that you have created via the API/excel upload even using this attribute in the Tasks application.
The Tasks application now offers the source ‘External’ as a filter option whenever there are items existing with this assigned source type. Using this, you can quickly filter the content that is imported into your project.
2. Combine the Source with the External Reference attributes (ID, Name, URL) to specify the content origin and enable navigation to the specific item in the originating application.
The example below shows the link to the JIRA item embedded within the External Name in the Additional Information of the task created from the excel upload.
In the Project Overview you have the possibility to view the progress and status of the content created from the external applications.
Note: There is an ‘External ID’ field which is available for a long time and was offered for the same purpose of linking the external objects with the project items created in Cloud ALM. You can continue using this for simple integration to find and update Cloud ALM items created from the external application. However, for future use cases, our recommendation is to use these new External Reference fields because you can provide additional context to these external items and easily track them once they are imported to Cloud ALM.
