How to Update Task Level Enterprise Custom Fields in PWA

[luis.fls.marques]

Hello everyone, I already posted this message in
microsoft.public.project.server but because this may require a custom
solution I am also posting it here

We are using MS Project Server 2007.

The big question is: How to Update Task Level Enterprise Custom Fields
in PWA?

The problem is that we have custom enterprise fields defined at task
level. What we would like to do is have resources assigned to tasks
update these task level fields. In our case, because we only have one
resource per task there wouldn’t be a problem with multiple resources
providing different updates.

As far as we can see, in PWA 2007, the only editable view that you can
provide updates is the Mytasks page. Mytasks allows us to display the
custom fields but when our team members update them, the custom fields
get updated at the assignment level but not at task level, so in
summary, there is no roll up of the updates... The consequence is that
when we open the project in project professional 2007 and go to the
Gantt chart view, the updates are not shown.

Is there any place in PWA (maybe using a different view) that allows
updating custom fields at task level rather than assignment level?

At this moment the only 2 alternatives I can see to achieve this is to
either write a server event handler that updates the task level custom
field when an update is done at assignment level or write a macro that
does this automatically whenever someone opens the project in MS
Project professional 2007 (easier to accomplish but maybe not as clean
as the server event handler option).

Has anyone come across this problem before?? and if so, what solution
did you implement?

Any help at this point would be greatly appreciated.

Regards,

Luis.

 

[luis.fls.marques]

Just to let you all know, I found a way of rolling the updates up from
assignment level to task level by creating a Macro that runs whenever
the schedule owner opens the schedule in Project Professional.

This is the macro I used (the custom field in question "LFM_Text" is
an enterprise field):

Sub Project_Open(ByVal pj As Project)
Dim T As Task

If Not (pj Is Nothing) Then
If pj.Tasks.Count > 0 Then
For Each T In pj.Tasks
If T.Assignments.Count > 0 Then
T.LFM_Text = T.Assignments(1).LFM_Text
End If
Next T
End If
End If

End Sub

I was pleasantly surprised to find that the enterprise custom field
can be referenced just like any other property!!! (even though it
doesn’t appear in the list that the VBA editor gives you)

As mentioned on my first post, I only have one resource per task. If
more than one resource per task existed, a more complex aggregation
formula could be coded. In this case, however, this wasn’t necessary.

If one of you finds a more efficient way of achieving the same
objective of rolling up updates from assignment to task level please
do let us all know by posting here