Re: [Planner Dev] The link tasks dialog - screenshot.

[Lincoln Phipps <lincoln phipps openmutual net>]

Mikael Hallendal wrote:
> On tis, 2004-04-13 at 10:50 +0100, Lincoln Phipps wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> Will you get this dialog everytime you click the "Link" button or just
> when you have selected more than two tasks? I thinkt he dialog is too
> complex to show everytime you try to link two tasks.

Yup - you will. Reason being that the relation, lag and "direction"
at least have a meaning here. The cascade/fan-out/fan-in only have
any purpose when you have more than 2 selected tasks. Maybe I
should only show the mode radio widgets when more than 2 tasks
are clicked ?

The default though is the current default so someone clicking the link
button and then clicking OK gets what happens today without thinking 
about what they want.

> > Lag - this takes a string e.g. 1h, 1d or 1w etc and
> > maps this to the internally used lag which is in
> > seconds.
>
>
> It would be great if we could come up with a way of making it more
> obvious what this value can be (this is the problem in all places where
> you type a period). 

When its a second, minute or hour then no problems. Its when we talk 
about 1 day or 1 week that there is a user understanding difference
between a calendar/elapsed day/week/month and a working day/week/month.

For instance a working week is 40 hours, yet a calendar week is
7 days of 24 hours each (to me) and a business week is 5 days.

Maybe we have a check-box/project default that says that Lag 
day/week/month are calendar/elapsed or are working/business days ?.
It will be very easy in the code to do this as its just got hard
coded stuff already like 5 days = 1 week.

> > Then the more unsual features which are more relevant when
> > you have a selection of tasks that you are linking,
> >
> > e.g. if you have tasks 1,2,3,4 then...
> > Cascade of links would be 1->2, 2->3, 3-> 4 etc
> > Fan-out of links would be 1->2, 1->3 1->4 etc
> > Fan-in  of links would be 1->4, 2->4 , 3->4
>
>
> Are these standard phrases, to me fan-out and fan-in doesn't make much
> sense when just seeing the dialog. 

fan-out is a commonly used term used to describe "1 to many"  so maybe
I should use "1 to many" ?

Fan-in is used to describe "many to 1" - again maybe thats a better
term ?

Will it just use the first of the
> tasks (from above) to decide which one is to be the one used as "main
> task" in fan-out or fan-in or will it be decided with respect on the
> "Direction" selection?

Yup the direction is used as well. As to which task is the 1st (or last) 
does depend upon the direction too. A fan-out in a forward direction
would have all tasks having the first task as the predecessor.
A fan-out in a reverse direction would have all tasks having the last 
task as the predecessor.

A fan-in in a forward direction would have all tasks being predecessors 
to the last task (as per my capture). A fan-in in a reverse direction 
would have all tasks being predecessors to the first task.

> > Direction of upwards means link arrows flow upwards
> > visually, whereas downwards means link arrows flow
> > downards.
>
>
> Direction doesn't really tell much of what is going to happen. It says
> which way the arrow will point but what is really interesting is that
> the lower task will be blocking the one above instead of the other way
> around.

Direction was a way of describing which way the link flowed for all
4 cases (FS, SS, SF, FF).

A direction of downwards means that the predecessor is visually above 
the task i.e. has a lower WBS number).  A direction of upwards means 
that the predecessor was visually lower that the task (i.e. the 
predecessor has a higher WBS).

> In general I feel that the dialog is a bit complex and hard to
> understand. Mode and Direction doesn't (to me at least) make a lot of
> sense. Any ideas on how we can make it more clear what is going to
> happen once you click OK?

Attached are images for the 6 possible combinations of the FS relation,

i.e. 3 modes x 2 directions.

the file name describe what it is...

planner-relation-mode-direction.jpeg

thats why it sounds complicated because there is a wide variety of
pretty sets of links that you can create and they do look nice and
take just a split second to create with my dialog :)

> Regards,
>   Mikael Hallendal
>
>
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