Connecting Bold BI to Azure DevOps data source

Bold BI dashboard designer supports connecting to Azure DevOps web services through REST API.

Choose Azure DevOps data source

To configure the Azure DevOps data source, follow the below steps:

Click the Data Sources button in the configuration panel to add a new data connection.
Click CREATE NEW to launch a new connection from the connection panel.
Select the Azure DevOps connection in the connection panel.

NOTE: You can also create a data source from the home page by clicking the Data Sources menu from the left menu panel and selecting Create Data Source from the data sources page.

Choose data source from server

Authentication with Azure DevOps

Use the following steps to authenticate with Azure DevOps web service:

Click on the data source, which will prompt a login window. Enter your Azure DevOps account credentials to authorize.
Click Allow in the authorization window to accept the scopes requested by Bold BI dashboards.

NOTE: If permission is denied, the account will not be accessible from the dashboard.
Provide a name to identify the account and click Next.
You have now successfully authorized your connection. Click Connect to continue with the data source connection.
To connect via an already connected account, refer to Connected Accounts.

NOTE: To connect to another account, click Connect New Account.

Connect to Azure DevOps

Create Azure DevOps data source

After successful authentication, the NEW DATA SOURCE configuration panel opens. Follow the steps below to create an Azure DevOps data source:

In Azure DevOps, you can fetch data through Boards by selecting an item from the Board Items, or using Raw Query with REST endpoints.

Fetch data based on board items

Enter a name and optional description for the data source.
Enter your Account name and Team Project name.
Select one of the Board Items from dropdown list. The options are based on categories in work items like Tasks, Bugs, and Stories.
In the Max Rows field, enter the maximum number of rows to be fetched from the Azure DevOps data source. This value is used to fetch the data from the Azure DevOps data source via pagination.
Choose a time interval for Refresh Settings using the combo box to trigger the Rest API request periodically and keep the data in sync with the Bold BI dashboard.

Fetch data using Raw Query

Enter a name and optional description for the data source.
Please enter a valid Azure DevOps REST API endpoint in the URL textbox. Refer to the Azure DevOps API documentation for more details.

Example: https://dev.azure.com/<:Account>/_apis/projects

NOTE: With this, you can extract data from other Azure DevOps services such as Azure Pipelines, Azure Repos, Azure Test Plans, and Azure Artifacts using the prepared endpoint.
Choose a time interval for the Refresh Settings using the combo box to trigger the REST API request periodically and keep the data in sync with the Bold BI dashboard.
Select the GET method for the REST API in the Method combo box.

You can also edit the connection information set here using the Edit Connection option.

Additional information

Max Rows	Most REST APIs return only a limited amount of data on a single API request. To retrieve the necessary amount of data, you can set a value in this field. Pagination is handled internally and will fetch the required data.
Refresh Settings	The period of time before the next refresh call is triggered. This will automatically trigger a call to the API configured in the data source to keep the data up to date. If you do not want to sync your new data, choose ‘Never’.

NOTE: Raw Query option returns only the default records per query.

Setting up the URL

Login to Azure DevOps.
Obtain the account name from the listed accounts under My Organization.
Replace <:Account> in the URL with the account name from the above step.

For more information on the API endpoints available for this data source, refer to their official API Documentation

Sample queries

Projects

https://dev.azure.com/TestAccount/_apis/projects

Test Plans

https://dev.azure.com/MyOrganization/TestProject/_apis/testplan/plans

Builds

https://dev.azure.com/MyOrganization/TestProject/_apis/build/builds

Preview and Data import

Click Preview & Connect to connect with the configurations that have been set.
The Choose Schema(s) dialog opens. The schema represents the key fields of JSON data retrieved from Azure DevOps Rest API request. This dialog displays a list of schemas in treeview and its corresponding values in grid for preview. Select required schema(s) from treeview to use in designer and click Connect.
Now, the data design view page with selected table schema opens. Drag and drop the table.
Click Save to save the data source with a relevant name.

Connected accounts for OAuth data sources

If you have already logged into the account and authenticated with the web data source, the account information will be listed here. You can select one of the accounts or connect to a new account by clicking the Connect New Account button.

OAuth