User story parent-child traceability links disappearing after bulk edit operations

ALM Rally (Broadcom Agile Central)
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1

We’re experiencing a critical issue where parent-child relationships between user stories are being lost after bulk edit operations through the Rally REST API. Our compliance reporting depends heavily on these traceability links.

The problem occurs when we use bulk edit to update multiple child stories simultaneously. After the operation completes, the parent references are null even though the API returns success status:

POST /slm/webservice/v2.0/hierarchicalrequirement/bulk
{
  "updates": [{"_ref": "/story/12345", "Owner": "/user/789"}]
}
// Returns 200 OK, but Parent field becomes null

This breaks our traceability reports and story hierarchy integrity. We’ve verified the parent relationships exist before the bulk operation, but they consistently disappear afterward. Has anyone encountered similar behavior with bulk edit API calls affecting parent-child relationship persistence?

2

This is a known limitation with the bulk operations API. The issue stems from how the endpoint processes hierarchical relationship fields versus standard attributes. When you perform bulk updates, any omitted relationship field gets reset to null as a safety mechanism to prevent unintended cascading updates across the hierarchy.

We worked around this by always including the Parent reference in our bulk payloads, even when we’re only updating simple fields like Owner or State. It adds overhead to fetch the current Parent values first, but it’s the only reliable way to maintain story hierarchy integrity during bulk operations.

3

Thanks for the suggestions. We’re processing thousands of stories daily, so individual updates would create significant performance issues. Rachel’s approach of explicitly including Parent references sounds more practical. I’m curious though - how do you handle the additional API calls to fetch current Parent values before each bulk operation? Does that create rate limiting concerns?

4

I’ve seen this exact issue. The bulk edit endpoint has quirky behavior with hierarchical fields. When you update child stories in bulk, you need to explicitly preserve the Parent field in your update payload, even if you’re not changing it. Otherwise the API treats omitted hierarchical fields as intentional nullification.

5

I want to add one more critical detail that helped us solve this completely. Beyond including Parent references in your bulk payload, you also need to handle the API response validation carefully. Sometimes the bulk operation reports success but individual items within the batch fail silently.

Here’s our complete solution approach that addresses all the key aspects:

1. Bulk Edit API Behavior - Explicit Field Preservation: Always include Parent field in updates, even when unchanged:

{
  "updates": [
    {"_ref": "/story/12345", "Owner": "/user/789", "Parent": "/story/11111"},
    {"_ref": "/story/12346", "State": "In-Progress", "Parent": "/story/11111"}
  ]
}

2. Parent-Child Relationship Persistence - Pre-fetch Strategy: Query current relationships before bulk operations using pagesize=200 to minimize API calls:

  • Fetch all stories in batch with Parent field included in query
  • Build in-memory map of story-to-parent relationships
  • Merge with your update payload before sending bulk request

3. Traceability Report Validation - Post-Operation Verification: After bulk edit completes, implement validation workflow:

  • Query updated stories and verify Parent fields match expected values
  • Compare against your pre-operation snapshot
  • Log any discrepancies for manual review
  • Retry failed items individually if mismatches detected

4. Story Hierarchy Integrity - Error Handling: The bulk API can return 200 OK even when some items fail. Parse the response body carefully:

response.CreateResult.forEach(result => {

  if (result.Errors.length > 0) {

    // Log error and add to retry queue

    console.error(`Story ${result._ref} failed: ${result.Errors}`);

  }

});

5. Additional Safeguards:

  • Implement batch size limits (we use 50 stories per bulk request)
  • Add exponential backoff retry logic for transient failures
  • Schedule periodic reconciliation jobs that validate parent-child links against source of truth
  • Enable audit logging to track when relationships are modified

We’ve been running this approach for 6 months across 15,000+ stories with zero relationship loss. The key is treating bulk operations as potentially destructive and building comprehensive validation around them. The performance overhead is minimal compared to the cost of broken traceability in compliance reporting.