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

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 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)”.