We have a work item structure in TFS 2015 (Will soon be upgraded to 2017, in case there are features there which may be relevant) which consists of the usual CMMI template hierarchy: Epic->Feature->Requirement (Where requirement is roughly analogous to PBI in other templates, for those unfamiliar)
We have abstracted the large body of work by making Epic and Feature meaningful. Applying a common analogy, an Epic->Feature->Requirement in this setup for a requirement on a webpage might be [Security]->[Password Management]->[Password Complexity rule xyz]
The main problem is that, while the 'tree of work items' type query is powerful and useful for this setup, some features of TFS only work on flat list of work item type queries, including dashboard widgets. Continuing the example above, if I wanted to create a widget to see how many Security Requirements (PBIs) were completed, I could not do that.
I'm looking for ideas on how to get around this restriction in VS2015 or VS2017, and the best solution I can think of so far is to create a service hook which uses the TFS api to traverse the tree and then copy the title or ID of the parent Epic/Feature onto the Requirement in some dummy field. This seems very clunky and inelegant. Another option would be to mirror the Epic/Feature hierarchy in Areas, but this is quite unfavorable as we use the Area for another purpose and it creates a maintenance problem as they would need to be kept in sync.
