Starting project from a hyperlink, embedded control, something?

[Jonathan Stone]

Anyone ever come across a way to start ms project and populate it with some
sql task data? I've got a web app that has tasks and general data that can
be populated into ms project files for the ease of gantt chart viewing. Now,
its one thing to go into MS Project and 'Open a new file' choose ODBC, then
go through the wizard, but I have several hundred engineers here and need to
come up with a way to almost hyperlink into a project file with a certain
query result of data. Is there some windows automation even I could call for
someone who has MS Project installed? I have to think i can call project
from a script with odbc variables or generate a file that would call ms
project in such a fashion.

Any ideas?

I'm rather new to working with MS Project, coming from building web
apps...so client server is also a little different for me too.

Thanks for any ideas!

 

[Rob Schneider]

Wow. Tall order. I'm not at all sure I understand what you are trying to
do, nor why do it this way ... but as a first step in helping you answer
your question, perhaps the first step would be for you to review the
document projdb.htm which is provided in one of the Microsoft Project
program folders (serach for it) which documents the Midrosoft Project
Database. This will explain to you how to populate the db, then use
PRoject to view the db (which is what I think is your goal).

Any reason you aren't going the other way? use Microsfot Project to
store (and manage) project information, then push that data to these SQL
db's? Might be simpler and might help the projects more. Just a thought.

 

[Jonathan Stone]

It's a tall order, it may not even be doable, but i've written a project
management site that works on the premise of a web version of many old excel
files that a bunch of people used to use, so this was step one to getting
away from using excel, and to replicate these files in a manner that
everyone was able to work still, MS Projectand Project server was just too
constraining, and the now that this site has turned into a huge project
itself with task management (i feel as tho i just finished writing some sort
of pseudo-project server... so now since many of our customers are used to
seeing gantt charts for the timelines, this is the last step, to produce an
output from this website as a project file (maybe there is a better
solutions out there, but since i know its very easy (for me) to import
pertinent task information into a project file from the sql server, i have
to think project is the right solution... i just wish it could be acceptable
to have there be several steps to import the manually for all these
engineers, its really pretty easy... oh well... the one click solution would
be nice i guess...

 

[Rob Schneider]

Maybe just Google around for some commercial Gantt Chart drawing
programs that you can include on the web server (PHP, Perl, VB, Java, or
whatever). Write code from SQL db that inputs to a program that
produces a Gantt.

Just a quick search pulls up http://thepcsweb.com/products/webgantt/
Don't have a clue about it's quality or if it even works, but is a
start. There are surely more out there.

My hunch is that punching the data back onto Project isn't the way to
go. Project is a client end-user tool.

 

[Lars Hammarberg]

You could re-format the Excel data in XML format and either use the Project
schema or create a map between your dump and the Project schema and then
simply open the resulting XML file using Project.
Sounds like fun!

 

[Jonathan Stone]

This is what i've stumbled upon too... the XML output.. now the question
is... is there an XML mime type that describes an XML project file? such
that i can write this generated project xml data to the browser and have it
open into project... seems there should be...

 

[Lars Hammarberg]

Not that I'm aware of - but if you do not want to open the Project
application, you could create a web page with the Project web Gantt
component and link it to the data source of your choice using a simple
query - the query could simply retrieve data direvtly from the Excel
workbooks, if need be.
Bear in mind, though, that using this component requires a Project Web
Access license for everyone looking at that page...
Another way to handle this could be to prepare an Excel Map in Project (A
project "Excel Map" is a template for retrieving data from Excel - see
File/Open from file... in Project) and save this data out again to an HTML
page using an export map (same thing only other direction) which will add a
gif of the project plan. This method could be automated in lots of ways,
including simply scheduling a cmd file to open the latest file in a
dedicated folder and having a Project auto-open macro save it out again
using the HTML Map.


--

/Lars Hammarberg
www.camako.se
MSProject Premier Partner