Bad External Links

[egun]

My latest VBA project is a macro to scour a Project file for bad links.
"Bad" can mean many things, but in this case it means a link to an external
file that is messed up in some way.

Examples:

Predecessor field shows that the link should be external, but the ghost task
has a Project field that is internal.

Different number of successors showing in the Successors field than is given
by theTask.SuccessorTasks.Count

et cetera.

We're working with (literally) hundreds of separate files, all linked
together, so it would be nice to have an easy way to hunt down and kill bad
links. Any suggestions?

Thanks,

Eric

 

[Rod Gill]

Can't help too much with the bad links search, looks like you've pegged the
obvious. However for replacing them, I use:

In Project Server I provide a form in a macro that lists all Projects and
then all milestones for teat project. PM's can select a milestone and the
project title and milestone's task unique ID is saved in custom fields in
the selected task.

I then have another macro that automatically reads the latest date and %
complete of the linked task directly from the database and update the task
accordingly. This dramatically improves file open times and eliminates
possible corruptions from linking.

With .mpp files links between files can be very problematic as over-writing
files, renaming or moving them can corrupt one or both files at either end
of the link. My macro would work if you firstly let users browse to a
project file then read all milestones using oledb (see pjoledb.htm in one of
Project's program folders) then let the PM select a milestone. The macro
would then save the full pathname and Task Unique ID in two custom fields.

The second macro would again use oledb to read task latest date and %
complete. This would only work reliably if there was a central place for
saving all master copies of .mpp files and file names didn't change.