[michaelaye]

I know that OG is busy with OP on the iPad but it would be nice to finally have these bugs fixed, some of them half a year since notification. Maybe at least some comments about their status? (The PDF layout bug seems simple to fix to me, but maybe not?):

• Bug in filter subsystem (dependency chain filter working depends on showing it in group tasks or flat list)

• a MPP milestone is not imported as a milestone but a 0-day
  task (i know you are working on a new importer, any beta test soon?)

• PDF export respects wrongly the height of uncollapsed lines, even so only the Gantt chart should be produced, producing a very low density Gantt chart with odd heigh lines.

• Drawing of dependency lines look cluttered due to overlayed date string drawing (the date separator interrupts the dependency line)

• Project->Catch Up to Date (Or toolbar button 'Update completion of tasks to a certain date) does not update milestones (bug or feature?).

plus very useful and helpful feature requests:

• OP to remember the last
  state of the checkbox 'Only update selected items' for the dialog
  'Update completion of tasks to a certain date'.

• Include 'Do NOT match' filter criteria

Best regards,
Michael

[Tom Bunch]

That's a great list. I'll try to get real answers to the last half but

• I just fixed the first issue in revision 160654
• The new MSP import/exporters are in the 2.1 alpha. The old ones are gone.

I expect MPP import and export to have lots of issues. That file format is a big black box. It's basically impossible to prove that we have it right, but trivial to prove we don't by counter example. So we need as many of those counter examples as we can get!

I will try a very simple mpp project w/ a milestone, but my recollection is that that particular issue is fixed.

-Tom

[Tom Bunch]

Ok, regarding drawing of dependency lines overdrawing text... Sometimes I think it's just going to have to, but it would be nice if the horizontal lines could avoid text. The little shadow of background color around the text is the problem here, but it's really necessary to keep the text legible against whatever clutter there may be behind it. In 1.x we didn't have this problem because the lines were 1px wide and the line endings were relatively crude. The proper fix for this is probably to put one more pixel of vertical space between tasks, but my ears are still screaming from the last time we tried to give our views a little elbow room.

Maybe you could try this. The default Whole Document font size is 12 pt. Change to 11 pt. and compare. Now try 13 pt.

You'll notice a new feature, I think. The Gantt bars and row height change. If you want to go back to the font size of 10.0 pt that we used in 1.x, you can get almost as many rows in a window as you could then. But this is a digression.

There are little rounding differences as we try to make everything fit. At 11.0 pt, we steal a little space at the bottom and the turn as a horizontal dependency line connects w/ a task immediately below it w/ an arrow head get's a little smooshed. I think we might be able to adjust our algorithm so that the horizontal lines run consistently below the text shadow but that smooshing isn't so great either.

Fixed "Catch Up To Date" for ya.

-Tom

[michaelaye]

Great news, thanks for your work! And I will be happy to send you all the MPP import problems I get! I'm actually surprised you still bother with export, as your XML export works rather fine (apart the tiny little bugging error message for all unsupported columns), but the most important thing is that the dates are correct.

[michaelaye]

Just tried the most recent sneaky peek, not really for working yet. ;) Somehow you managed to drop "Duration" from the columns menu.
But anyhow, 3 bugs squashed keeps me quiet for a bit. Then again, that MPP importer... ;)

[Tom Bunch]

Hi Michael,

Got your bug about the row colors overdrawing the today stripe (they also overdraw date grid lines and off-hours), which is a known bug. But I don't see any reports of problems with the MPP importer.

The Duration column somehow got renamed "Time". I think that was an accident, but I'll ask around.

-Tom

[michaelaye]

Originally Posted by Tom Bunch

Hi Michael,

Got your bug about the row colors overdrawing the today stripe (they also overdraw date grid lines and off-hours), which is a known bug. But I don't see any reports of problems with the MPP importer.

The Duration column somehow got renamed "Time". I think that was an accident, but I'll ask around.

-Tom

The MPP import problem you should find under the support number
OG #690428

I really would dislike 'Time'. Faar to unspecific...

[Tom Bunch]

Hi Michael,

Ok, that's a bug report in the old importer. The new one gets different results. The milestone in question is now imported as a milestone, and the date of it differs by one day from what OP 2.0.3 came up with. Your original report was that the milestone was off by one day, so that's promising. The new importer also gets things in a somewhat different order and some tasks wind up with different task numbers. I'm trying to verify that all these differences are more correct than the old importer, but Windows is making me cry. I'm getting insane errors from Win 7 and MSP alike and haven't managed to even open your file in almost 20 minutes of trying.

Hopefully we have that particular user experience beat.

-Tom

[Tom Bunch]

Ok, finally got that working (by running Project as Administrator!) and it looks like we've got some steps forward and some back. The tasks are incorrectly getting reordered, the milestone in question is imported as a milestone with the correct date. The project start date is 12/21/2010, which we import correctly, but MSP lets you schedule tasks before the project start date, whereas in our world we don't, so we need to back-date the project start date to the actual date where, er, the project starts, if you will. Back to work.

Tom

[michaelaye]

Originally Posted by Tom Bunch

Ok, finally got that working (by running Project as Administrator!) and it looks like we've got some steps forward and some back. The tasks are incorrectly getting reordered, the milestone in question is imported as a milestone with the correct date. The project start date is 12/21/2010, which we import correctly, but MSP lets you schedule tasks before the project start date, whereas in our world we don't, so we need to back-date the project start date to the actual date where, er, the project starts, if you will. Back to work.

Tom

It would be really good, if the task numbers stay the same in MSP and OP. To my knowledge, OP was one of the few Mac scheduling programs that achieved that in the past.
The backdating problem I had as well, this 'feature' of MSP cracks me up all the time. ;)
We really should propagate the XML format more. If I ever will be in the position to push for a schedule exchange format, I will push for XML of course.