Problem programmatically deleting detail tasks

[Kyle]

I am trying to massively simplify a project plan that contains thousands of
repetitive tasks embedded within hundreds of summary tasks. I need to retain
the summary tasks, and retain the durations that the summary tasks currently
calculate based on the detail children. If I delete the children
programmatically, the summary tasks remain summary tasks, and have
non-editable durations that take on a life of their own. Any ideas on how to
revert summary tasks to non-summary tasks prgrammatically, delete the
children, and retain the pre-deletion summary tasks' durations?

 

[Dave]

I am trying to massively simplify a project plan that contains thousands of
repetitive tasks embedded within hundreds of summary tasks. I need to retain
the summary tasks, and retain the durations that the summary tasks currently
calculate based on the detail children. If I delete the children
programmatically, the summary tasks remain summary tasks, and have
non-editable durations that take on a life of their own. Any ideas on how to
revert summary tasks to non-summary tasks prgrammatically, delete the
children, and retain the pre-deletion summary tasks' durations?

Essentially the only to convert summary tasks to normal tasks is to
remove the tasks that lie under them in the outline structure. You can
either delete the child tasks or promote the child tasks to the same
outline level as the summary.

Of course doing the above will change the duration of the summary tasks.
To overcome that, you can insert a duration column, Duration 1 for
example. Then click on the header of the duration column, right click
and copy it. Then click on the header for the duration 1 column, right
click and copy it.

Then, having promoted the child tasks to the same outline level as the
summary, you can then copy the durations back to the duration column.

 

[Kyle]

Thanks for the help- I am finding that when I attempt to manually delete or
outdent the last child for any summary task, nothing happens. Project thinks
for a few seconds and when it stops, all the tasks are still there in an
unchanged state. I can delete the last task in VBA, but the aftermath is a
summary task with no children. Is there a 2003 bug that disallows reversion
to non-summary state in some condition, or are there other characteristics of
the tasks that I should be investigating? Very frustrating! Thanks again
for your help!

 

[Kyle]

Arrrrgggg....I just found a patch that fixes this in 2003. I installed it
and it works. Thanks for your help Dave!