7Pace / Azure DevOps Plugin for ManicTime

Summary

This is a plugin for the ManicTime time-tracking application. It serves to ease the task of tracking time against Azure Work Items, and publishing tracked time to the 7Pace Azure DevOps extension.

It achieves this in 2 ways:

• Assigned Work Items are automatically available as Tags in ManicTime.
• Created Tags are used to update 7Pace time sheets on-the-fly.

Setup

Installation

Download Install.exe and run as administrator. This will extract the plugin to the correct plugins directory for Manic Time.

Example:

    C:\Users\%username%\AppData\Local\Finkit\ManicTime\Plugins\Packages\MFitzpatrick.TagSource.Azure7PacePlugin`

Restart ManicTime.

If you wish to compile the installer yourself please see the Installer Readme.

Configuration

TL;DR Puzzle Icon > Plugin Manager > Settings, then enter configurations.

You should now see a plugin named Azure 7Pace Tag Plugin within ManicTime. (Puzzle icon at top right of window > Plugin Manager)

Click on settings, and enter your Azure Personal Access Token (with read access to work items), as well as your TimeTracker API secret. The TimeTracker API secret can be generated within Azure DevOps. Navigate to Time > Configuration > API. Check the box to activate reporting API access, and press the Create Token button to generate the secret.

Below that is the field to configure which organization in Azure DevOps the work items should be retrieved from.

Finally you can specify the Activity Type ids for billable, and non-billable tasks in 7Pace. There are at least 2 ways to get a list of activity types and ids.

1. GET request to https://<organization>.timehub.7pace.com/api/rest/activityTypes?api-version=3.0-preview, using the Time Tracker Api Token for Bearer Authorization.
2. In Azure DevOps, navigate to Time > Configuration > Activity Types, and inspect the data-id attribute of the radio buttons.

Features

• Currently assigned tasks are available as tags in ManicTime.
  • Id, Project Name, Task Name (as additonal notes)
• Last 7 days of Tags are monitored, Tags further back can be considered 'locked', so there is no danger of losing too much history should you lose tags locally.
• Time that you manually enter into 7Pace will not be affected by this plugin.
• Added Tags (that originate from this plugin) will syncronize with 7Pace, this includes all creates, edits, deletes of Tags dated within the last 7 days.
• Configurable WIQL query for retrieving items from Azure DevOps.
  • Separate Billable + Non-Billable queries.

Contributing

There are a few important points to note:

• Plugin runtime must be .net framework 4.5. I tried upgrading to 4.7.2 but it would not appear in plugin listing.
  • As a corollary, any netstandard libraries must be 1.1 or below.

The projects WorkItemService, TimeTrackingService and HttpExtensions all generate package files on build. Located in <ProjectRoot>\bin\<configuration>.

These currently are not hosted and are manually included as a NuGet directory in Visual Studio.

Tests

There are currently no tests.