TfsWorkItemMigrationProcessor Fails: ‘Length cannot be less than zero. Parameter name: length’

[ma-chni]

@MrHinsh

Using v.16.3.3

During migration of a TFS project using TfsWorkItemMigrationProcessor, the process fails with the following error:

Microsoft.TeamFoundation.WorkItemTracking.Client.UnexpectedErrorException: 
The server operation failed. (Length cannot be less than zero. Parameter name: length)

The failure occurs in TfsWorkItemMigrationProcessor.cs (line 652 or line 878) when the tool attempts to update a work item revision.

Note: During local debugging, we observed that the affected work item contains four revisions with identical timestamps, which seems to trigger the error when replaying historical revisions.

Enabling TfsRevisionManagerTool with "ReplayRevisions": false allows the migration to succeed, but this skips all historical revisions, which is not acceptable because full revision history must be preserved.

Question:

How can we modify the migration process or configuration so that all historical revisions are migrated successfully, without encountering the “Length cannot be less than zero” error in TfsWorkItemMigrationProcessor?

[MrHinsh]

This would require an analysis and code change.

There is supposed to be some code in there that checks for identical datetimes and increments them... It seams you have a new corner case that we do t have a story for.

[ma-chni]

Could you advise on the recommended approach for safely incrementing or adjusting duplicate timestamps during migration?

[ma-chni]

Could this field Microsoft.VSTS.Common.ClosedBy (Closed By) when set to <<Unassigned>> in source be the problem?

[MrHinsh]

Could you advise on the recommended approach for safely incrementing or adjusting duplicate timestamps during migration?

@ma-chni as stated this should already be true, and any aditional corner case that you may be experiancing would require aditional code be written on the product.

Could this field Microsoft.VSTS.Common.ClosedBy (Closed By) when set to <> in source be the problem?

it should be null if it doesn ot have a value.