Hello, I'm evaluating Aspose.Tasks as a possible tool for use by my company. I'm noticing one thing that I'm not sure I can work around...
Project allows the Deadline field to be NULL and displays as (N/A) but your Aspose.Tasks object model defines Deadline as a System.Date field. As I read through the tasks using your tool I see a bogus date in that field when the project file is displaying (N/A). Aspose.Tasks returns the correct deadline date when there is one present, but a bogus date when the field is null.
My question is: how do I determine if the deadline date is real or bogus?
In case Deadline field is NULL or N/A in MS Project it will be equal to System.DateTime.MaxValue in Aspose.Tasks. The same true for all date properties in Aspose.Tasks.
OK. I noticed that that is the way it should work based on the other datefields in the task, so I dug a little deeper.
Using MS Project I put unique dates in the deadline column on several tasks.
Using VS 2005 and Aspose.Task in debug mode I'm stepping through the tasks in my sample project file and here is what I'm coming up with as I look at the dates that your task object is exposing:
The dates I entered in the deadline field are not coming up in ANY of the dates fields that I can find in the task object, and I can't figure out where the dates that are showing up in the deadline field are coming from. It's a mystery.
I was concerned that perhaps I didn't save the project file with the new dates so I reopen the project file and sure enough my dates are there.
I know that I'm reading the correct project file because the changes that I make to the other date fields show up just fine.
As a possible work-around I could use Date1 and rename it "DeadlineDate" in my project template file as changes to Date1 seem to be working fine in Aspose.Task, but I thought you should know the issue.
BTW: I'm still using an evaluation copy of the program if that makes any difference.
It took some time to test Aspose.Tasks with many different projects but I can tell deadline dates work right. So if I set some date in the Deadline field in the MS Project then I have the same date in the Aspose.Tasks in the debugger. Evaluation copy can’t be a problem. It only saves project documents with 2000 year but in the debugger dates should be correct.
Please check if you read correct task in the VS2005. Don’t forget, first task in the MS Project should be in most cases on the second position in the tasks collection and so on.