Timephased data

Aspose.Tasks Product Family
1

It doesn’t appear that you do anything with the project’s timephased data. Is that true?

2

No, that is not true. New development of Aspose.Tasks started 2 months ago.
There are many plans. The main are better xml support with timephased data,
support for Project 2007 mpp format, improved project data management.
Also we are thinking about projects recalculation again.

3

Can I talk to you or someone directly concerning the next version of Aspose.Tasks?

There are certain features that we require that seem like they may be in this next version. We are looking to incorporate Aspose.Tasks into an existing commercial product so that we will no longer require customers to install MSProject on the server.

We have a lot of experience with MSProject and may be able to provide some free guidance to you as well as beta testing.

Initially, we must be able to do the following:

  1. Read an MPP that may be in 2007, 2003, or 2002 format and then save the project to a database. We must be able to save as an update to an existing project in the database as well as be able to insert a new project.

  2. Read a specific project from a database and save it to a new MPP. We may require the ability to specify which MPP format to use (2007, 2003, 2002).

You are probably aware that Project 2007 does not have a save to database function and therefore there is no Microsoft defined format for new Project 2007 data elements. I can help you with what to do about that if you don’t already have a plan.

Please let me know how much of the above is definitely in the next version and if we can be a beta test site for these features.

Down the road, we would like to be able to do the following (time-phased/critical path scheduling):

  1. Add, change, or remove “actual” hours for a specific resource on a specific assignment for a specific day and have that cause the project schedule to recalculate the same way as in MSProject. It is important to note that adding “actuals” to an assignment is supposed to cause either the task duration to recalculate or the assignment units for the remaining duration to recalculate depending on whether the task has been marked as using “fixed units”, “fixed duration”, or “fixed work”.

  2. Change the project calendar or a resource calendar and have that cause the schedule to recalculate the same way as in MSProject.

  3. Change a resource’s availability percent and have that cause the schedule to recalculate the same way as in MSProject.

There are a number of things to be aware of to implement true critical path scheduling. You probably already know this but the following items are so critical that I am including them:

  1. You have to apply the project calendar + each resource calendar + each resource’s daily availability percent to calculate a duration given a start date and work hours. Like availability, a calendar can have changing work hours during the entire duration of the project. The daily work hours over time are often referred to as contours.

  2. Any change that affects work, duration, or units for an assignment or task will only change one other of those three things. Which item is changed depends on if the task has been marked to use “fixed units”, “fixed duration”, or “fixed work”. So for example, if the task uses “fixed units” and you change the number of planned or actual work hours, then it is duration that must get recalculated. Recalculating the duration then requires that you do the contouring described above. You should note that when a task uses “fixed duration”, there are scenarios were the results you get in MSProject for certain changes are very unexpected.

  3. It is possible that if a project is not set to be “effort driven” that some changes will produce different results. I have not verified this and I hope it is not the case.

I have created about 35 scenarios just for testing changes to actual work for fixed duration, effort driven tasks and I can probably share these with you. I would need to modify them to remove the use of our product for conducting the changes.

Please let me know if the above is part of your future plans and what I can do to assist you in getting this out the door.

–

Evan A Barr, MCSD
Project InVision International
www.ProjectInVision.com

4

Hello Evan,

Currently we are working on second part and I hope most of required features will be available.
We are very appreciate any help and if you can provide scenarios for testing it would be great.

The first part (I mean saving MPP to database and database to MPP) is a huge problem.
I’m not sure if we can implement writing MPP files. It will be investigated of course but later.