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Post by jreece »

Hi,

We're exploring the Export to MSP feature and have a few questions.

  • (Most important) It looks like the Assigned Resources are not exported, all of the Resources get exported but they are not linked to tasks - is this intentional and if so, is it something you plan to implement and on what timescale? We would really like to use this in our next release but the lack of this feature is difficult.

  • Am I right in thinking there is no way to customise which records get exported? For example configure it to only export a subset of tasks or resources. Would you consider a way to customise this?

  • Am I right in thinking there is no way to customise which fields get exported? Would you consider a way to customise this?

Just a side note - but it's really great that this is now browser based, that's really big for us


Post by arcady »

jreece wrote: Fri Jan 28, 2022 4:44 pm

Hi,

We're exploring the Export to MSP feature and have a few questions.

  • (Most important) It looks like the Assigned Resources are not exported, all of the Resources get exported but they are not linked to tasks - is this intentional and if so, is it something you plan to implement and on what timescale? We would really like to use this in our next release but the lack of this feature is difficult.

It exports assignments if you use MS Project 2013 format (https://bryntum.com/docs/gantt/api/Gantt/feature/export/MspExport#config-msProjectVersion):

const gantt = new Gantt({
    features : {
        mspExport : {
            msProjectVersion : 2013
        }
    }
});

Thing is when developing the feature we faced some issues w/ MS Project understanding what we exported since we were not able to provide it w/ everything it expected (namely MSP needs time phased data for each assignment). So we had to add some limitations to the feature to make it work both in MSP 2013 & 2019. It doesn't always export all 100% of the data but that's a start.
The feature is pretty young and for sure to be improved in the future.

jreece wrote: Fri Jan 28, 2022 4:44 pm
  • Am I right in thinking there is no way to customise which records get exported? For example configure it to only export a subset of tasks or resources. Would you consider a way to customise this?

  • Am I right in thinking there is no way to customise which fields get exported? Would you consider a way to customise this?

That's going to change in the upcoming 5.0.0 release. The feature will introduce a new dataCollected event there. It's going to give access to the collected data:

const gantt = new Gantt({
    ---
    features : {
        mspExport : {
            listeners : {
                dataCollected : {{ data }} => {
                    // patch <Project><Name> tag content
                    data.Name = 'My Cool Project';
                }
            }
        }
    }
});

Post by jreece »

Thanks, that's all great info! I'll try that soon. Have a nice weekend :)


Post by jreece »

I tried to export in '2013' format and import into 2019, and there are no Resource assignments - I guess that's expected?

Could you provide a list of differences between the two modes. We only want to go with one for now and are trying to understand which is better. I've only had a 2019 copy of MSP to test on but it seems that both formats import into it in the same way and you see the same data. What is the difference?


Post by jreece »

Also, from looking at the code, it looks like getAssignmentsData returns an empty array if the mode is 2013. So should it actually be working for 2019?

I should probably add that we're on 4.3.5


Post by arcady »

Oh sorry. My bad I must've misread the condition. You are right it does export assignments for ver 2019 and does not for ver 2013

        if (this.msProjectVersion === 2013) {
            return [];
        }

Could you provide a list of differences between the two modes.

Looking at the code there are only two places where the msProjectVersion is used:
1) getResourcesData method - it does not export resource calendars info for version 2013
2) getAssignmentsData method - it does not export resource assignments for version 2013 (as you already found out)


Post by jreece »

No problem!

But in that case, the export assignments does not look to be working at all. I've recorded this short video:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1xcNx1u3FIbLnrYcDU5J0mCTWVuwyUeLq/view?usp=sharing

My Microsoft Project version is 16.0.14729.20260. The export was taken straight from the online example untouched.


Post by arcady »

Yes I see it now. Here is a ticket for the bug: https://github.com/bryntum/support/issues/4104
Thank you for the report!


Post by jreece »

Thanks

When you have the fix, could you also provide a snippet of what needs to be changed so we can override it and temporarily patch it? We may not have time to take another release.


Post by arcady »

Ok. I expect that fixing the bug will affect only MspExport class so you will be able to simply replace it.
I'll let you know here when the issue is fixed.


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