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

• How to modify existing reports
• How to edit description or report template names
• How to create your own report templates
• How to localize a Merlin report template
• Further tips for localizing an xslt report template
• How to add  an option in an xslt report template
• How to add  an option in a python / wbl report template
• How to add a property into an existing xslt report
• How to add a property into an existing python /wbl report template

Now let’s do some magic with the reports.

• What if you want to map a status or flag information to a graphic file?
• What if you want to be able to define the size of the project image over the options?
• What if you want to list overdue tasks along with the next activities, in “Next Due Activities” report?
• What if you want to report planned, actual and planned vs actual work per phase in a chart?
• What if you want to report expected work costs per role for your resources?
• What if you want to report expected work costs per resources’ group?
• What if you want to report the project’s name in the Next Due Activities report?
• What if you want to modify the “Milestone Trend Report” to show the WBS in the table and in the chart?

What if you want to modify the “Milestone Trend Report” to show the WBS in the table and in the chart?

Merlin delivers a template for “Milestone Trend Report” which is python based.

Quick and dirty approach:

When editing this report template in order to get the value of the “WBS” of the milestone in the table, you can simply enter the property “wbsCode” in the iteration for the milestones of the project in the wbl part of the report template:

To replace the chart labels of the x axis, you can off course simply modify the xTicks(self) method in the py part to ask for the wbsCode instead of the milestone title. That means

title = milestone.wbsCode().replace("\"", "\\\"")

Making it flexible:

To make this more flexible we need to define two new options in the Info.plist. A check box to enable the display of the MS WBS, and another for a prefix, as some PMs like to have wbs code for milestones starting by an M or MS:

Now you can put the output of wbsCode and the prefix in conditionals in the wbl…

and modify the xTicks as shown:

Result

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 “Milestone Trend Report (plus MSWBS)”.