MERLIN – DO A BIT OF MAGIC IN REPORTS – PART XIII

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.


Report element costs by type
Should you choose to record costs on elements of Merlin projects and define the cost type, you may want to have a report outputting costs by type.

So you need to get first all elements of a project. Following python method does so, excludes private elements…

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MERLIN – DO A BIT OF MAGIC IN REPORTS – PART XII

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.


Report billable costs entered on elements
Costs entered on elements may or may not be billable to your customers. This report may output such costs in a table.

So you need to get first all elements of a project. Following python method does so and excludes private elements.

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MERLIN – DO A BIT OF MAGIC IN REPORTS – PART XI

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.


Report cash flow for expected cost or approved budget
We have used snippets from the ‘cost distribution’ report template as basis.

In a Python method we collect all tasks with group and sub-tasks.

In the WBL we iterate in this array and output the desired values

Getting the task number is easy, you need to ask its flatOrder. ‘title’ and ‘expectedCost’ bring the total costs of each item. The method spaceByLevel places a space before the item’s title for indentation purposes. It calculates as 15px per level. Continue reading

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

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 expected or actual resources’ work per phase?

We have used the report template as posted in this thread of Merlin’s user forum in Google.

Changed the methods asking for resource costs to ask for resource expected or actual work.

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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("\"", "\\\"") Continue reading