Comments on: Gantt Charts in Notes Views – The Sequel http://www.eknori.de/2007-07-15/gantt-charts-in-notes-views-the-sequel/ the weird world of eknori Tue, 27 Jul 2010 13:36:47 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0 By: Nathan T. Freeman http://www.eknori.de/2007-07-15/gantt-charts-in-notes-views-the-sequel/comment-page-1/#comment-189 Nathan T. Freeman Mon, 16 Jul 2007 13:29:34 +0000 http://www.eknori.de/archives/439#comment-189 Part of the idea was that the view would be able to show a fairly arbitrary set of contents. If you look at the folder-construction stuff, the idea is that you specify the zero date in the folder control, and it builds the columns based on that. The ViewTitle stuff was just a hack to get a proof of concept done. The folder build actually tunes the formula to hard-code the zero date at the time of building the folder. That being said, I think this is a great modification. What I'd really like to do is have a "project" doc that specifies starting point and resources, and then you build all the tasks off of that. Each task could have a multi-value "prerequisites" field that provides a list of other tasks which must come first. If it's a direct series, then you only need to specify the one right before it. THEN, have it build the start dates based on the lengths specified for each task. That way, you could shift the length of any given task, and have it run through and reset all the subsequent start dates for dependent tasks. Then you start getting close to a real project timeline tool -- especially if we made those "duration" columns have in-view edit events. That being said, I got distracted on my own blog, but I was going to do a writeup about how I'm not sure that this is a terribly useful trick. A Gantt chart really truly ought to be a composite app element in Notes 8. We should ultimately be building an Eclipse/Java tool for Gantt charts that plugs into Notes views with a certain structure. Then we could do stuff like drag-actions for timelengths that drive backend rescheduling events. Part of the idea was that the view would be able to show a fairly arbitrary set of contents. If you look at the folder-construction stuff, the idea is that you specify the zero date in the folder control, and it builds the columns based on that. The ViewTitle stuff was just a hack to get a proof of concept done. The folder build actually tunes the formula to hard-code the zero date at the time of building the folder.

That being said, I think this is a great modification. What I’d really like to do is have a “project” doc that specifies starting point and resources, and then you build all the tasks off of that. Each task could have a multi-value “prerequisites” field that provides a list of other tasks which must come first. If it’s a direct series, then you only need to specify the one right before it.

THEN, have it build the start dates based on the lengths specified for each task. That way, you could shift the length of any given task, and have it run through and reset all the subsequent start dates for dependent tasks. Then you start getting close to a real project timeline tool — especially if we made those “duration” columns have in-view edit events.

That being said, I got distracted on my own blog, but I was going to do a writeup about how I’m not sure that this is a terribly useful trick. A Gantt chart really truly ought to be a composite app element in Notes 8. We should ultimately be building an Eclipse/Java tool for Gantt charts that plugs into Notes views with a certain structure. Then we could do stuff like drag-actions for timelengths that drive backend rescheduling events.

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