Does the "Create Work Item on Failure" option exist for Azure DevOps YAML Pipelines?

Question

In Azure Devops "Classic" pipelines, there's a section in the pipeline Options menu where you can turn on a feature to automatically create a work item on pipeline failure. However, in the new YAML pipelines, this feature is not present in the options menu. Is this option still available in some way, or is it not supported for YAML pipelines?

Answer 1

Although this option is not currently available via the GUI for YAML pipelines, it is nevertheless still functional under the hood - there's just not an easy way to turn it on. You can, however, do so by utilizing the Azure DevOps REST API.

First you'll want to know the name of your Azure DevOps organization, project, and the pipeline's Definition ID, which is a query string parameter on the URL when you're viewing a given pipeline, e.g. https://dev.azure.com/{organization}/{project}/_build?definitionId={definition id}. Then, you'll want to send a GET request to the Pipelines API for that ID, using this URL format: https://dev.azure.com/{organization}/{project}/_apis/build/definitions/{definition id}?api-version=5.1. For authentication, you should be able to use Basic auth, leaving the username blank and using an appropriately scoped Personal Access Token as the password.

If your request is successful, you should get a response containing a large JSON object which describes the pipeline in question. There's a lot there that isn't relevant, but what we're looking for is near the top: there's an options array which includes the following element:

...
    {
        "enabled": false,
        "definition": {
            "id": "a9db38f9-9fdc-478c-b0f9-464221e58316"
        },
        "inputs": {
            "workItemType": "Task",
            "assignToRequestor": "true",
            "additionalFields": "{}"
        }
    },
...

That ID of "a9db38f9-9fdc-478c-b0f9-464221e58316" appears to be static across all pipelines, and uniquely identifies the option to create a work item on failure. If we edit the JSON to change "enabled": false" to true (and set any other desired options in the inputs fields), we can now take the entirety of the JSON response from our GET request, and use it as the body of a second API call to the same URL, this time a PUT request. If all was correct, you should see your updated changes reflected in the response from the PUT.

It's a bit clunky because there's still no way to verify that the option is turned on through the web UI, but until Microsoft updates the UI to include this feature, it's the best option available. One more handy tip is that if you already had a classic mode pipeline where you'd added Additional Fields or other customizations to the UI, you can do an API GET on that pipeline to extract the exact JSON for those settings and use them to inform your PUT to your YAML pipeline.