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 

AppleScript: Custom WBS-Codes

AppleScriptIn the Merlin German user forum  in Google groups* a user asked, how to define WBS codes for all activities like 1.1.1… but have milestones coded by a leading M (so for example M.1.1.1)

Well, Merlin users know how to define WBS coding schemes. They simply call File >WBS Code Definition… and define a prefix or counters as desired. But such an action would apply the same numbering scheme for all activities and milestones. So how to proceed in meeting the requirements of this specific user? The answer can be, either renagotiate the WBS coding or try an AppleScript approach..

If you can spare one of the three columns (Subtitle, Additional tittle or Notes) just use the following Applescript writing in one of these columns the WBS code of the tasks in the desired manner. So…

tell application “Merlin”

  Continue reading