Is there a table which holds all possible states of a determined work Item type in TFS?

I'm developing a Time Tracking system in TFS so we can control how much time is spent in each task. I'm doing it by checking changes in work items states, and recording the time between states.

I'm using WCF and TFS2010 alert subscription.

Then I noticed the State column in the WorkItem table holds a string, instead of an ID pointing to a State.

With that in mind, I noticed I would have to parse each state and check if it corresponds to some string. And then, some day, someone might want to change the State name. Then we're doomed开发者_运维技巧.

But before I hardcore (or put in some random config.xml)... let me ask, is there a table which holds all possible states of a determined work Item type in TFS?

The states of work item types are stored in the process template files. You can export the work item type to an xml file using witadmin.exe and see the allowed values of the "State" in there.

Programmatically, you can use the Microsoft.TeamFoundation.WorkItemTracking.Client namespace to get the WorkItemType object of your work item type, look for the FieldDefinition object of the "State" in the FieldDefinitions property, then get the possible states from the AllowedValues property of FieldDefinition class.