Server Access Programmer's Guide:
Using Project Schedules

A project schedule is an eRoom item in which you track the individual tasks of a project. A Project Schedule Page object manages an eRoom Project Schedule on its own page. To create a Project Schedule Page, use the CreateProjectSchedule method in the IERUContainer interface of any container object. Project Schedule Pages offer basic containment capabilities through the IERUContainer interface. They also offer basic information through the following IERUItem properties: Name, ID, Creator, CreateDate, Modifier, and ModifyDate. Project Schedule Pages also implement the following project schedule-specific interfaces:

• IERUProjectSchedule&emdash;This interface provides methods for creating tasks and setting properties on the Project Schedule. These include specifying grouping columns and sorting columns, specifying holidays, and managing progress reports. Some of these operations work the same way as they do for Database items (for example, sorting and grouping columns and being able to import and export the content).

• IERUProjectSchedulePage&emdash;This interface provides properties that let you work with the Project Schedule Page. Use the Description property to get or set the rich text description of the project. Use ShowTopic to indicate whether the embedded topic is displayed in the user interface.

Creating Project Tasks

You can create individual tasks within the Project Schedule by calling the CreateProjectTask method. Tasks contain the name and description of a task as well as its scheduling properties, such as duration, start date, progress completed, and depedencies. Tasks are also items, and so can be manipulated with all the methods and properties of the IERUItem and IERUProjectTaskPage interfaces.

Progress Reports

Owners of the project schedule can insist that task owners submit progress reports on their task at regular intervals by setting the EnableProgressReports property to true and setting the ProgressReportInterval property to an appropriate value. The ProgressReportInterval value is in days. After you set this, task owners are required to enter their progress on the task at every interval that you specify. To see the ongoing progress for any task, you call the ProgressReports property on IERUProjectTask, which returns a collection of all the project reports that have been logged for this task.

Summary Data

The IERUProjectShedule methods whose names start with "GetSummary" enable you to obtain a particular value from a specified collection of tasks in the schedule. You do this by specifying the collection using one of the values from the ERUProjectSummaryType enumeration.
 

Depending on the method you call, it will return the summary data for the start date, end date, duration, progress, or status of the collection of tasks. For example, GetSummaryStartDate returns the earliest start date among the tasks, and GetSummaryDuration returns the total duration for all the tasks specified.