How to Add Gantt Charts (JSGantt) to Feng Office

[allenlook]

% Complete is now working, but not yet posted to the source code files above.  I've also added a checkbox to enable/disable including completed tasks, and I want to finish pulling the color from the workspaces to show on the Gantt before I post another update.  Hopefully sometime this week.

[allenlook]

I've added a feature that will allow you to "truncate" your workspace/ milestone/ task names to a certain number of characters.  I still need to put a field on the form that allows you to specify the number of characters - 50 seems to be a good number.

Once truncated, the Gantt chart lays out much more nicely.

By truncated, I mean that with a setting of 50, a very long task name will be cut off at 47 characters and a '...' will be added at the end to indicate that the entire string is not being shown.

Enough of it still appears to be useful, and the layout is much improved. 

[WiZaxx]

I'm speechless...
This is just brilliant work so I can only say THANK you for sharing.

like them or not, without Gannt charts it becomes very difficult (if not impossible) to present summarize a project schedule.

--Wz

[Nuno Zimas]

I am actually quite much into graphing project management data.
This should be definitely added tom the main dev trunk.
Thanks for sharing!

[allenlook]

While the Feng Office team is welcome to any and all of this work, I do not imagine it is of a quality that they would want to support in its current state.

Thank you for the appreciation though, and we will of course continue to post any improvements.  The Gantt charts are very helpful to us when we are brainstorming and setting up projects initially, and they are helpful when we are communicating to new members, upwards to management, or across to other functions in the business.

[allenlook]

When you deal with really big Gantt charts, you'll find very quickly that Firefox and Internet Explorer will not print a web page that has DIVs that span more than a page width.  These Gantt charts (jsGantt specifically) use DIVs to make the bars on the chart, and as a result everything just gets cut off to a single page, although I have made changes to the CSS of jsGantt to allow it to be printed and previewed on multiple pages vertically with no problem - horizontal is still an issue.  Using just FF or IE you can have a Gantt chart 12 pages tall, but only one page wide!

I have figured out a solution though.  If you install a PDF printer driver, like CutePDF or PDFCreator, you can select it as a printer and specify that your paper is 11x17 landscape.  Then you can fit an entire year on one sheet of paper, and you can also use many other PDF tools to manipulate the output once it's in that format.

Sorry that it's not automatic or polished, but it does work around the bugs that have been in FF and IE literally since 2000!

Bear in mind that the output of the my_jsgantt view is a list of projects and tasks with a work breakdown structure and parent/child relationships intact, and you could also use that view to feed your favorite Gantt program with a little bit of work.

And many thanks to our SQL guru Kevin Stone for doing the heavy lifting with the views!

[allenlook]

Colors are now being pulled from parent workspaces for all tasks, and the truncate function for task names is working nicely.

Both features have an input field on the data selection form now.

New code will be posted shortly.  The workspace colors require an additional function that will be included in the source code.

UPDATE: Latest source code has been posted to the original thread.  This is all the work I will do on this unless something compelling comes up - it meets our needs as it stands so we need to augment Feng Office in other ways and basically get down to doing the projects that are *in* Feng Office   Bugs will be fixed if found of course.  Disclaimer added to indicate you use it completely at your own risk.

If anyone modifies or updates the gantt feature, and would like me to post it here so it's easier for everyone in the community to find the latest and greatest, I'd be glad to do that, just send me a PM or an email and I'll post your updates with due credit.

[allenlook]

Minor bugs fixed in sub-task nesting and in start/end date logic.  New source code is posted.

[carcam]

Dear allenlook,
I am very excited with this contribution and willing to install it in my server. Nevertheless, when I try to execute your SQL code in the server to create the views, I get the following error:

Code: [Select]

#1064 - You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near 'DELIMITER $$

DROP FUNCTION IF EXISTS `fengoffice`.`my_GetMileStone`$$

CREA' at line 1
Any idea of the problem?

PS: Lots of thanks for this great work.

[allenlook]

You're very welcome.  Perhaps you could post the whole SQL statement and we could take a look - something may have been left out during the cut-and-paste.

[Henry]

Hello allenlook,

i can not execute the sql command and if i open the file  feng_gantt_5.1.sql i see 5 functions declaration of my_GetMileStoneColor().  

[gain]

Hi.
Thank you very much for your work.

I'm trying to install it on Feng Office 1.6.2, but have problems with sql script:
ERROR 1146 (42S02) at line 50: Table 'fengoffice.my_workspaces' doesn't exist

Tried also with a new installation, but no success and same error...

Do you know why?
Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks again.

[allenlook]

I'm trying to install it on Feng Office 1.6.2, but have problems with sql script:
ERROR 1146 (42S02) at line 50: Table 'fengoffice.my_workspaces' doesn't exist.  Tried also with a new installation, but no success and same error...

I may have left the brief instructions in the SQL file out in my haste to re-post them.  If your database is not named "fengoffice" you will need to simply search and replace each occurrence of fengoffice with the name of your database.  Then the SQL scripts should work.

[allenlook]

i can not execute the sql command and if i open the file  feng_gantt_5.1.sql i see 5 functions declaration of my_GetMileStoneColor().  

Do you get a particular error message?

I will check the SQL code right now and if I made a mistake in cutting/pasting the functions, I will fix it right away.  Sorry for the confusion.  It's easier to change Feng Office than to explain how or package up the changes apparently.  

UPDATE: Yes, of course it was my mistake, I have posted the correct code in the original post as feng_gantt_6.0.zip.

[allenlook]

There are a few more updates in the works today, specifically sorting.

I believe that a Gantt chart should be a "waterfall" from left to right, with tasks that start earliest at the top left.  This leads to:

Workspaces don't have a date, so they should be alphabetical.

Milestones have a due date but no start date, and confusingly their date has nothing to do with the date(s) of constituent tasks or sub-tasks.  jsGantt resolves this, however, by setting the start and end date of a milestone to the earliest and latest dates of the constituent tasks.  Bear in mind that a milestone in project terms is a single-date achievement, but because we are using milestones to "group" tasks and sub-tasks for our projects in Feng Office, we (and jsGantt) are treating them more like groups or sub-projects than actual milestones.

Tasks and sub-tasks should be sorted by Start Date, End Date, then alphabetically.

That is probably the next version we will be sharing.