[Anthony Leyland]

hello,

I am using omni plan for managing a 12 week construction project. having gone to the trouble of assigning resources to all the tasks, is there any way I can export lists of materials (with quantities) to send to suppliers, ideally filtered according to group? I.e. if I group all electrical components together, I can send a list of these to the electrical supplier?

I have no html experience and so cannot as yet create my own templates.

thanks, in anticipation

[skwirl]

There isn't a way to filter just the materials and export a list currently. If you are grouping your resources the quickest method would be to collapse all the groups except the materials group, then export a outline only PDF. Your electrical supplier will see the other group headings in the outline, but at least he/she will also get a list of materials you need along with the quantities.

[Anthony Leyland]

thanks for your reply; thats what I ended up doing - crude but effective.

Can I say that, although I like omniplan very much, this is perhaps a bit of an oversight; I am sure it wouldn't actually be too difficult to allow filters to act on resource lists or to export filtered lists in CSV /text format. Surely purchasing is a crucial part of most projects

Any plans for the future? is it something I could do using HTML / CSS if I took the trouble to learn?

[whpalmer4]

The format of the HTML files is pretty straightforward. The resource report gets emitted in the same order as the resources are listed in the document's resource view. If your resources look like this:



You'll get a report that looks like this:



The HTML to produce this is pretty easy to read, even if you don't know anything about HTML. You just have to remember that HTML expects symmetry (bookends, if you will).

In the example above, the materials listing starts with HTML code like this:

            <tr class="resource Group">
                <td style="padding-left: 10px;">materials</td>
                <td></td>
                <td></td>
                <td></td>
                <td></td>
                <td></td>
            </tr>
            
            <tr class="resource Material">
                <td style="padding-left: 20px;">Widgets</td>
                <td>10/8/08 8:00 AM</td>
                <td>10/8/08 4:00 PM</td>
                <td>7h</td>
                <td>0%</td>
                <td></td>
            </tr>

and later the staff resources start with:

            <tr class="resource Group">
                <td style="padding-left: 10px;">staff</td>
                <td></td>
                <td></td>
                <td></td>
                <td></td>
                <td></td>
            </tr>
            
            <tr class="resource Staff">
                <td style="padding-left: 20px;">Me</td>
                <td>10/8/08 8:00 AM</td>
                <td>10/8/08 4:15 PM</td>
                <td>7h 15m</td>
                <td>0%</td>
                <td></td>
            </tr>

Those are pretty easy structures to recognize, I trust you'll agree. The table rows start with <tr blah blah blah> and end with </tr>. Inside the row structure are the table data elements <td (optional styling)>(table data)</td>, one per column in the row.

Now, if you want to convert the original report to show only the materials resource section, using your favorite text editor, remove all but the materials resource section from that part of the file, leaving the closing portion of the file as shown below:

            
            </table>
        <p/>
        <p class="footer">Exported 10/11/08</p>
        <p class="footer">OmniPlan&nbsp;1.6.1 beta 1&nbsp;by <a href="http://www.omnigroup.com">The Omni Group</a></p>
    </body>
</html>

[Anthony Leyland]

thanks for that; I will give it a go