The Merge Work Items Activity recombines split versions of the same work item back into one work item, combining their work item properties. There are some limitations when managing work items that have been split. If the split versions of the work item have updates made to the same properties, and those values are different, when the work items are merged, those differing values will be combined into a pseudo-array. This pseudo-array is not consistent, making it very difficult to properly handle such properties. Therefore, having merged work item versions produce the pseudo-arrays should be avoided. This can be accomplished in several ways:
- Ensure that each parallel path updates different work item properties. For example, if parallel reviews are being conducted by different groups, name the properties set in those reviews to reflect the group (such as qaApproval=Yes/No and salesApproval=Yes/No).
- Ensure the properties that may have had different values are reset to the same value in each path prior to the merge. For example, each path may include multiple steps with branching or even looping and work item properties will need to be used to control that. But once that processing has completed and the work item versions are ready to be merged, those properties are no longer needed. A Set Properties Callout BIC activity can be configured to precede the Merge activity to reset all of those properties so that when the work item versions are merged, each version will have the same values for those properties resulting in a single property (vs. the pseudo array properties) in the merged work item.