Merlin – Do a bit of magic in reports – Part VII

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Those of you who have checked our new post series about “Merlin report templates” know by now…

Now let’s do some magic with the reports.

What if you want to report the project’s name in the Next Due Activities report?

Merlin delivers a template for “Next Due Activities” report which is based in XSLT. When editing this report template in order to get the value of the “project” for a task, you will see that it is not very easy to browse up the related xml node and locate the name of the parent project. To work around this issue, we simply modified the “classic report” python report to output the desired information.  You may download  it from here. An output sample:

And the report options:

Installation:

  • Extract the zip first
  • place the contained mrept package under the following path of your mac: ~/Library/Application Support/Merlin/Reports
  • (in case you have no “Reports” folder please create it first and pay attention to name it exactly as “Reports”)
  • restart your Merlin and
  • call File > New Report… to find the new report called “Next Due Activities (with project information)”.

9 thoughts on “Merlin – Do a bit of magic in reports – Part VII”

  1. This is a great report, but for me is missing the ability to filter by resource. I want to choose the resource and see the work they’ve got coming up!

    I will attempt to modify this in the report, according to your instructions, but have found this tricky in the past!

  2. Hi Tom,

    you can add the following dict in the options:
    info.plist

    		
			key
			selectedResource
			possibleValuesKeyPath
			project.sortedMasterResources.title
			restrictToPossibleValues
			
			title
			For Resource
			valueClass
			NSString

    insert the following initial value in the class MERNextDueActivities(PWReportPage) of the main python script:

    self.selectedResource = “”

    and modify the upcomingActivities, overdueActivities, and deadlineActivities methods as follows to check for the selected resource:

    	def upcomingActivities(self):	
		result = []
		minStart = NSDate.systemNowInGMT()
		maxStart = self.duration.dateFloatedFromDate_(minStart)
		resource = self.selectedResource
		
		for activity in self.project.visibleSimpleActivities():
			start = activity.expectedStartDate()
			assignedResources = activity.assignedResourcesString()
			if resource != None: 
				isResourceInActivity = (assignedResources != None) and resource in assignedResources
			else:
				isResourceInActivity = True
			if (not activity.isPrivate()) and (not activity.isMilestone()) and start>=minStart and start<=maxStart and (not activity.isComplete()) and isResourceInActivity:
				result.append(activity)
		return NSArray.arrayWithArray_(result).sortedArrayUsingDescriptors_(self.upcomingActivitiesSortDescriptors)
		
	def overdueActivities(self):
		result = []
		now = NSDate.systemNowInGMT()
		resource = self.selectedResource

		for activity in self.project.visibleSimpleActivities():
			start = activity.expectedStartDate()
			end = activity.expectedEndDate()
			assignedResources = activity.assignedResourcesString()
			if resource != None: 
				isResourceInActivity = (assignedResources != None) and resource in assignedResources
			else:
				isResourceInActivity = True			
			if (not activity.isPrivate()) and ((now>=end and (not activity.isComplete())) or (now>=start and activity.actualCompletion()==0)) and isResourceInActivity:
				result.append(activity)
		return NSArray.arrayWithArray_(result).sortedArrayUsingDescriptors_(self.overdueActivitiesSortDescriptors)

	def deadlineActivities(self):
		result = []
		minEnd = NSDate.systemNowInGMT()
		maxEnd = self.duration.dateFloatedFromDate_(minEnd)
		resource = self.selectedResource

		for activity in self.project.visibleSimpleActivities():
			end = activity.expectedEndDate()
			assignedResources = activity.assignedResourcesString()
			if resource != None: 
				isResourceInActivity = (assignedResources != None) and resource in assignedResources
			else:
				isResourceInActivity = True
			if (not activity.isPrivate()) and end>=minEnd and end<=maxEnd and (not activity.isComplete()) and isResourceInActivity:
				result.append(activity)
		return NSArray.arrayWithArray_(result).sortedArrayUsingDescriptors_(self.deadlineActivitiesSortDescriptors)

    Best regards, Vicky

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  7. Vicky,

    How do I modify the columns that are printed in the subsequent report? I’d like to replace the # column with WBS Code. I’d also like to replace “Resource” with a custom field called “Task Manager”. I’m not seeing a way to do this as that level of granularity appears to be obfuscated. Can I do these things with this report?

    Thanks!

    Raymond

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