Hello,

We have not yet purchased Calendar Pro because I still have doubts about one very important feature: the ability to create task tree templates. One of the major goals of customizing and implementing Calendar Pro is the reduction of redundant data entry so this is very important to this solution’s success.

Our projects are typically variations of a few standard sets of child phases and activities. We don’t yet have the full version so I haven’t actually seen the methods used to create phases and activities. Any thoughts on how to let users choose from a set of project templates and then duplicate and activate the chosen template? It’s easy enough to duplicate projects with the Filemaker command but it misses the child phases and activities. Bonus points if you have any advice on auto-generating phase/activity start and end dates based on a provided project start date. The more details the better but, at this point, I really just want to know how much I’m biting off here.

Like many users on this board, I feel like I’ve given the available documentation and posts a thorough read but I very well might have missed the bit I’m looking for. It certainly seems like a problem someone else would have encountered.

Thanks for your help,
Ryan

Hi Ryan,

Thanks for your post. You've probably found this item already, which provides a pretty general overview about how Projects, Phases, and Tasks are structured in SeedCode Calendar:

http://www.seedcode.com/pmwiki/pmwiki.p ... ndActivity

But when it comes to Task Templates, that isn't something which is built into the calendar. When we add this to the calendar we normally do so by making a new table to hold the template items. These are generally themselves children of a "template" table that holds a record for each template. In this way we can have any number of templates, each with its own set of tasks.

When it comes time to apply a template to a given project, we usually ask the user to select the name of the template they'd like and then import the template's default tasks into the project's activity table, creating instances of those templates for that project. We can then loop through these newly created records and assign dates to them based on the project's start or end date -- provided that the template item had some idea of how many days out from the start/end it should be.

I've attached a screen shot of a recent modification we made which uses this technique. (I imagine this screen shot tells you what you'd need to know to do this yourself, but this mod takes us a about 2.25 hours, so let me know if this is something you'd be interested in us doing it for you.)

Best,

John

Thanks for providing an outline. I've sent you an email concerning custom development pricing.

Ryan