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.

Continue reading

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 

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

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: Continue reading

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

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 work costs per resources’ group?

We work similar to the previous question and output group costs instead.  So you may download and use a report template we just created. Here some an output sample: Continue reading