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Azure DevOps Services | Azure DevOps Server 2022 - Azure DevOps Server 2019
Visual Studio 2019 | Visual Studio 2022
To find work items assigned to you or your team, run a query. Many work item queries are predefined with your process. Members of your team may have created shared queries that you can view and run. Often, it's easier to define a new query by building on the query definition that's already available to you.
Prerequisites
- Access levels:
- Have Stakeholder access to view and run shared queries. All project members have Stakeholder access by default. For more information, see Change the permissions for a shared query or folder.
- Have Basic access or higher to add and save a shared query.
- Permissions: Have your Contribute permission set to Allow for the folder that you want to add a query to. By default, the Contributors group doesn't have this permission.
Note
Users with Stakeholder access for a public project have full access to query features just like users with Basic access. For more information, see Stakeholder access quick reference.
- Access levels: By default, all project members and users with Stakeholder access can view and run all shared queries. You can change the permissions set for a shared query folder or shared query. For more information, see Set query permissions.
- Permissions: To add and save a query under Shared queries, you must be granted Basic access or higher. Also, you must have your Contribute permission set to Allow for the folder you want to add the query to. By default, the Contributors group doesn't have this permission.
Open Queries
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- Visual Studio
From your web browser, (1) check that you have selected the right project, (2) choose Boards > Queries, and then (3) choose All.
If it is your first time opening Queries, the page opens to Favorites. This page lists those queries that you have indicated are a favorite. Otherwise, you can choose All to view all queries you've defined and shared queries defined for the project.
Tip
Queries you or your team have chosen as favorites show up on the Favorites page. Favorite queries along with other objects also appear on your Project page. For more information, see Set personal or team favorites.
Run a query in Azure Boards
To run any query, expand a folder and choose the title of the query. The view opens to display the query Results.
You can also run a query by using the Azure DevOps command line interface.
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- Visual Studio
Tip
The Queries page, as with other web portal pages, remembers the view you last went to and returns you to that view.
Choose All to open the page where you can view all queries you've defined or that are shared within your project.
Choose My Queries as needed.
- To view all work items assigned to you, choose Assigned to me. This query uses the @Me macro to list all work items assigned to you.
- To view all work items you're following, choose Followed work items. This query uses the @Follows macro (ID in @Follows) to list all work items you've chosen to follow. For more information, see Follow a work item or pull request.
Choose Shared Queries to expand the folder and access queries saved as shared queries.
Choose a folder within a breadcrumb to open a query folder.
Run a query from the command line
You can run a query in the CLI with the az boards query command. To get started, see Get started with Azure DevOps CLI.
az boards query [--id] [--org] [--path] [--project] [--wiql] Parameters
- id: The ID of an existing query. Required unless--path or--wiql is specified.
- wiql: The query in Work Item Query Language format. Ignored if--id or--path is specified.
- path: The path of an existing query. Ignored if--id is specified.
- org: Azure DevOps organization URL. You can configure the default organization using
az devops configure -d organization=ORG_URL. Required if not configured as default or picked up usinggit config. Example:--org https://dev.azure.com/MyOrganizationName/. - project: Name or ID of the project. You can configure the default project using
az devops configure -d project=NAME_OR_ID. Required if not configured as default or picked up usinggit config.
Example
The following command runs a query with the specified ID and shows the result in table format.
az boards query --id 6c286d74-26a5-4cce-bfcf-bf9123495bfe --output tablePriority Node Name Work Item Type Title Remaining Work---------- ---------------- ---------------- -------------------------------- ----------------1 Voice Bug Apply fix elsewhere as needed2 CMMI Bug Slow response on form1 Fiber Bug Check issues with permissions 02 Fiber Bug Voicemail hang issue 02 FabrikamBB Bug Research slow response time1 FabrikamBB Bug Fix performance issues 0 The following command runs a query with the specified WIQL and shows the result in table format.
az boards query --wiql "SELECT [Microsoft.VSTS.Common.Priority], [System.NodeName], [System.WorkItemType], [System.Title], [Microsoft.VSTS.Scheduling.RemainingWork], [System.AssignedTo], [System.State], [System.Tags], [System.AreaPath] FROM workitems WHERE [System.WorkItemType] = 'Bug' AND [System.AreaPath] = 'Fabrikam Fiber' ORDER BY [System.WorkItemType]" --output tablePriority Node Name Work Item Type Title Remaining Work---------- -------------- ---------------- ---------------- ----------------2 Fabrikam Fiber Bug Slow response on form2 Fabrikam Fiber Bug Check permissions2 Fabrikam Fiber Bug Fix performance issue2 Fabrikam Fiber Bug Secure Sign-in Query directory, query folders, and breadcrumbs
Note
You can't add folders to My Favorites or Team Favorites.
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- Visual Studio
The Queries page contains a directory-focused view that you can filter to find specific queries of interest.When you're working in the Queries pages, you can go to a subfolder, folder, or page.
Also, you can choose a query that you've favorited from the selector menu, Or, you can choose to browse all queries, which returns you to the All Queries page.
For more information, see Query FAQs, Navigate, and Folders.
All and Favorites supported tasks
You can do most tasks for viewing and running queries from each of the queries list pages as indicated in the following table. Only queries you save under My Queries and have favorited show up under My Favorites. Only queries saved under Shared Queries can be favorited by a team.
Task | Favorites (Browser) | All (Browser) | Work Items (Team Explorer) |
|---|---|---|---|
| View all favorited queries, yours or a team you belong to | ✔️ | ✔️ | |
| View all your queries or shared queries for the current project | ✔️ | ✔️ | |
| Run a query, open the context menu for a query | ✔️ | ✔️ | ✔️ |
| Expand or collapse container folders or query folders | ✔️ | ✔️ | ✔️ |
| Filter the list of queries | ✔️ | ✔️ | |
Favorite a query (for web portal, choose  ) | ✔️ | ||
Unfavorite a query (for web portal, choose  ) | ✔️ | ✔️ | ✔️ |
Add a new query: Choose  | ✔️ | ✔️ | ✔️ |
Filter the list of queries
Enter a keyword into the filter box to filter the set of queries displayed on either the Favorites or All pages. To learn more about filtering, see Filter backlogs, boards, queries, and plans.
For more information, see Query FAQs, Navigate, and Folders.
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- Visual Studio
From the Query Editor or Results view, you can email a formatted list of query items or copy the query URL.
Choose the 
actions icon to open the menu and select from the options listed, Email query or Copy query URL.
You can only send the email to individual address for a project member that is recognized by the system. Adding a team group or security group to the to line isn't supported. If you add an email account that the system doesn't recognize, you receive a message that one or more recipients of your email don't have permissions to read the mailed work items.
Note
To email a formatted list to people who aren't project members, you'll need to use the Copy as HTML option described in Copy a list of work items. For on-premises Azure DevOps, all email actions require an SMTP server to be configured. If you don't have an SMTP server configured, you can work around this by using Copy as HTML.
Next steps
Define a query
Related articles
- Manage queries and query folders
- Interactively filter backlogs, boards, queries, and plans
- Change column options
- Set personal or team favorites
- Keyboard shortcuts
