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Other Topics => Feature requests => : WiZaxx February 13, 2010, 11:27:10 PM

: Gantt charts, 2 years of requests finally fullfilled by Allenlook
: WiZaxx February 13, 2010, 11:27:10 PM
Allenlook has found a solution and he is working hard to make it better and better, so skip this and go here:http://forums.fengoffice.com/index.php?topic=3826.0 (http://forums.fengoffice.com/index.php?topic=3826.0)

BTW, if you are tempted to vote "A what chart?" read thishttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gantt_chart (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gantt_chart)

--Wz
: Re: Gantt charts, 2 years of requests ignored
: Pet February 14, 2010, 02:04:45 AM
I voted yeah nice to have because I know it would be appealing to a lot of people, but actually I hate Gantt charts lol.
: Re: Gantt charts, 2 years of requests ignored
: conrado February 15, 2010, 11:19:44 AM
Ha! I liked the option 'A "what" chart?'.

Requests have not been ignored. There has been an attempt to raise funds to sponsor this feature but, as surprising as it may seem to some, it hasn't drawn much interest yet.
: Re: Gantt charts, 2 years of requests ignored
: WiZaxx February 15, 2010, 03:13:37 PM
Well, yes it was a provocative subject, and yes it was intentional. But I would like to move the mud over this topic a bit.

On my first attempt of getting some sort of Gantt viewer, I used the isGantt (with approval from the original developer) but the forum won't let me attach a screenshot.

Now I'm trying to build the XML file from the database using PHP but I'm not a programmer, so for me is a huge challenge.

Is anyone interested in joining forces?



: Re: Gantt charts, 2 years of requests ignored
: allenlook February 16, 2010, 12:41:24 PM
Absolutely.  We are building the queries and stored procedures over the past few days, and we have experimented with jsGantt, Google Chart, Google Visualizations, and most recently FusionCharts.

We'd be glad to share with you and the community, as soon as we find a good, printable, embeddable, and automatable Gantt chart - many of the ones we have tried either rely on a Google spreadsheet first (ViewPath Google Visualization), import of data (Gantter.com) or can't be printed (easily) or, or, or...

We are building a set of stored procedures that will create a "rich" set of data that contains both the original IDs of the workspaces, milestones and tasks, as well as new unique IDs for each, as well as a Work Breakdown Structure (WBS).  That way this one set of data can be used to feed all the different Gantt charts we're seeing out there, as well as (hopefully) the nice timeline views we've seen.

We'll also be working on PHP pages that can be embedded on a tab, and which allow for filtering by workspace, milestone, tasks, owner, date ranges, etc.
: Re: Gantt charts, 2 years of requests ignored
: WiZaxx February 16, 2010, 12:55:45 PM
Have you played with Open Flash Chart 2 at all?
I believe it is used in fengoffice already, right?

Anyhow, it seems you are waaay ahead of what I can do, so hat off!
: Re: Gantt charts, 2 years of requests ignored
: allenlook February 16, 2010, 01:07:06 PM
I was not aware of it, but I will look into it right now!  Thank you for the pointer.
: Re: Gantt charts, 2 years of requests ignored
: allenlook February 16, 2010, 01:14:55 PM
Open Flash Chart 2 does not appear to have a Gantt chart?
: Re: Gantt charts, 2 years of requests ignored
: WiZaxx February 16, 2010, 01:17:32 PM
But it is flash, and there is a huge base of flash developers we can leverage.
I'll check on this .................
: Re: Gantt charts, 2 years of requests ignored
: amejat February 16, 2010, 02:58:02 PM
Ha! I liked the option 'A "what" chart?'.

Requests have not been ignored. There has been an attempt to raise funds to sponsor this feature but, as surprising as it may seem to some, it hasn't drawn much interest yet.

Dear Conrado,

Could you please explain us what are:
- The development model of Feng Office ?
- The economical model of Feng Office ?

From my experience asking for a spreadsheet app and from your answer, it seems to me that:
- There is NO MORE active development for Feng Office
- ONLY "sponsored" features will be developed

It just does not make sense at all. This project started great but since you decided to become a "start up" and to try to make money on it, it just collapsed.

The only people answering emails are "commercial representatives". The only answer is "pay first and we will see". And there is no more official roadmap or development plans.

My humble opinion: KICK OFF all the commercial experts you hired and hire new developers. This project is going nowhere at the moment.

To me, it is a dead end and as long as I do not see a real development of it, I will not promote it anymore.
: Re: Gantt charts, 2 years of requests ignored
: WiZaxx February 16, 2010, 09:55:50 PM

We'll also be working on PHP pages that can be embedded on a tab, and which allow for filtering by workspace, milestone, tasks, owner, date ranges, etc.

I just came across this plugin for project.net. http://sourceforge.net/projects/dotmods/files/Interactive%20Gantt/ (http://sourceforge.net/projects/dotmods/files/Interactive%20Gantt/)
It is an interactive gantt  8). Do you guys think it could be tweaked to work in fengoffice?

Cheers
: Re: Gantt charts, 2 years of requests ignored
: allenlook February 17, 2010, 12:40:25 PM
Looks like most of the work on their website was done in 2003-04.  The demo site has been down for a long time, and their original SourceForge pages are deprecated and no longer available.

I'll try to download the latest iGantt, but it might just be a module addon for dotProject...
: Re: Gantt charts, 2 years of requests ignored
: allenlook February 17, 2010, 12:42:11 PM
Back in late '08, according to their forums...

"Hey guys,  I kind of abandoned this as it was more a proof of concept than anything. "
: Re: Gantt charts, 2 years of requests ignored
: allenlook February 18, 2010, 11:08:54 PM
I just want to update everyone that I have a new tab defined in Feng Office, and it contains a selection form to pick Workspace(s), Milestone(s), User(s) and Date(s) and it displays a Gantt chart using jsGantt.

The minor problem with jsGantt is apparently it needs all of the workspaces, milestones and task/subtasks to be added to it in the exact order they need to appear on the chart.  I thought it would not matter because it is array and parent/child based, but yes it does matter.  It is also *very* sensitive to data types and required values.

The hardest part is getting something that looks like a work breakdown structure out of Feng Office.  The workspaces are embedded in a ten-column construct (p1-p10), then the milestones are a single layer below that, then the tasks and subtasks are an infinite-depth construct that can belong to either a workspace directly (as Unclassified) or a milestone.  It is a bit complicated.

Note: If the Feng Office team has a way to generate a WBS would you be willing to share just that logic?  Obviously there is a way to do it as the workspace tree is generated and the milestone/task/subtask view is shown on the Tasks tab?

It will take us a bit longer to polish this into something I would even call a "hack", but we will post the solution back here for the community.

The Gantt chart will not need to be integrated as a tab in Feng Office, but it can be done.  I will include instructions when we are done.
: Re: Gantt charts, 2 years of requests ignored
: WiZaxx February 23, 2010, 07:37:25 PM
@Allenlook:
you really got the grasp fengoffice!
Don't let it go!

--Wz
: Re: Gantt charts, 2 years of requests ignored
: maxxer February 24, 2010, 06:01:12 AM
It will take us a bit longer to polish this into something I would even call a "hack", but we will post the solution back here for the community.

The Gantt chart will not need to be integrated as a tab in Feng Office, but it can be done.  I will include instructions when we are done.

oh, please!

but the sooner you post, the faster you'll get feedback and maybe contributions.

we're starving for this as well!
: Re: Gantt charts, 2 years of requests ignored
: maxxer February 24, 2010, 06:03:49 AM
There has been an attempt to raise funds to sponsor this feature but, as surprising as it may seem to some, it hasn't drawn much interest yet.

fund rising here over the web? not interested?
: Re: Gantt charts, 2 years of requests ignored
: allenlook February 24, 2010, 11:46:37 PM
OK, it took a few days of messing around, but we *finally* got the MySQL queries together that will report on all the workspaces, milestones, tasks and subtasks in their proper work breakdown structure (WBS) order.  JSGantt needs this to display correctly.

I've got a 95% working Gantt chart on its own tab that can be opened in a new window, print-previewed, and printed.  Firefox doesn't like DIVs that are larger than a single page, so that took an extra day to figure out.  It now prints as many pages tall as you like, but I still have some puzzling to do on making it many pages wide.  That's why I say it's 95%, otherwise I think it works great.

There is a data-selection form that has its own print-css style so it does not appear on printouts, but shows onscreen and allows you to select one or more workspaces, one or more resources (people) and a start and end date to build the Gantt chart with.

Once built, the Gantt chart can be dynamically changed (expanded/collapsed) and set to day/week/month/quarter.  Some of it is set for my preferences, but it's as simple as changing the value of a variable in the javascript to change it to look like you want.  It is slower in IE, but works better than in Firefox as far as layout goes.

Tomorrow I'm working on blending the CSS a little more with Feng Office, but I'll wrap up the steps (including the MySQL views which are named with a "my_" at the beginning to keep them separate from the "og_" tables), the view tab, PHP files, and Javascript that makes it all work.

It's all contained in just a few files, and there's not much hacking of Feng Office required, especially if you're already familiar with the "Hello World" method of adding a tab.  You don't have to change your existing tables at all, and in fact, you could just add it as a separate web page, and not even link it into Feng Office at all if you want to leave that pristine - the Gantt chart does not require Feng Office's front end, only the back end data tables.

I'll also wrap up my mod for the integrated SuperSimple blog/CMS tomorrow and try to post that in the appropriate thread.

I also want to note that I have not yet added the "dependencies" or "% complete" features.  The script has the ability, but Feng Office does not yet have a field for dependencies or % complete, and I did not yet have time to add one as a Custom field or to just add a column to the tables.  I do intend to do that, as well as probably building a separate dependency editor that will allow for seeing a task's true ID number and relating one task to another.

If done manually, it would be very simple to add them to the query that feeds the Gantt chart.
: Re: Gantt charts, 2 years of requests ignored
: allenlook February 25, 2010, 12:00:39 AM
Just to give you an idea of what it looks like, here is a screenshot.

(http://www.bitcarving.com/images/zzz_feng_gantt.jpg)
: Re: Gantt charts, 2 years of requests ignored
: allenlook February 25, 2010, 01:39:32 PM
I will start a new thread for the HOW-TO
: Re: Gantt charts, 2 years of requests ignored
: gain March 03, 2010, 07:49:48 AM
Waiting for the thread...  ;)

[edit]
already opened: http://forums.fengoffice.com/index.php?topic=3826.0
[/edit]
: Re: Gantt charts, 2 years of requests finally fullfilled by Allenlook
: conrado March 18, 2010, 12:05:24 PM
So great to see this happening! Thanks Allen!