Re: [Planner Dev] MSP2Planner

[Richard Hult <richard imendio com>]

On ons, 2004-08-11 at 17:21 -0400, Kurt Maute wrote:
> On Tue, 2004-08-03 at 19:28, Richard Hult wrote:
> > On tis, 2004-08-03 at 19:23 -0400, Kurt Maute wrote:
> > > On Tue, 2004-08-03 at 13:59, Richard Hult wrote:
> > > > Yeah, I had a look at their format a while ago and it would probably be
> > > > fairly easy to write an XSLT stylesheet to transform to/from it.
> > > 
> > > ok, I'll take a shot at creating the stylesheet.
> > 
> > It would be a really great addition! I hope my "fairly easy" statement
> > will hold ;)
> 
> Well, I'd say that most of the pain was due to the learning curve. 
> Here's the preliminary version of the stylesheet.  Hope you like it.

We are getting lots of cool stuff done lately, it seems like :)

> Here's a summary of what's implemented:
> * Project Info
> * Tasks
> * Constraints
> * Resources
> * Allocations
> 
> What's not:
> * Properties
> * Phases
> * Calendars
> * Resource Groups

Do these items (except calendars I guess) look feasible to convert, or
are they done very differently?

> Issues:
> * Lag doesn't translate correctly.  I need to do some more testing to
> figure out what the correct conversion is.
> 
> * Calendars!  Ugh!  (The sound you hear is my head banging against the
> wall.)  MS Project doesn't implement calendars with the day-type
> concept, at least not the way Planner does.  MSP lists the working times
> for each day of the week for each calendar.  I'm not sure if its
> possible to translate this into day types using an xsl stylesheet.  Any
> suggestions would be welcome.  For now - I've pasted the default
> calendar definition into the stylesheet so there will be a default
> calendar in the result file.

Yeah, we have a bit more advanced calendar handling (maybe a bit too
advanced...). It might be fine to just not handle calendars more than
what you've done. 

> I'd appreciate feedback from anyone who'd like to try it out.  You need
> MS Project 2002 or higher.  Here's what you do:
> 
> 1. In MS Project, do a 'save as', choosing 'xml format' as the file
> type.
> 2. Transfer the xml file over to your linux box.
> 3. Run the transformation:
> $ xsltproc -o [outputfilename.mrproject] msp2planner.xsl
> [inputfilename.xml]
> 4. Use Planner to open the [outputfilename.mrproject] file.
> 
> Check your tasks, milestones, resource allocations, predecessors, notes,
> and anything else you can think of.  Let me know how it looks!
> 
> Next, we need to talk about how to integrate it into the Planner menu. 
> I thought it might be cool if Planner could recognize the file format
> and automagically launch the transformation and open the result file,
> rather than create an import menu item.  It'd be easy to recognize the
> file, since the project tag looks like this:
> <Project xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/project";>

The drawback of just opening the file would be that the user would open
the file but would not be able to save it back to an msproj file, even
if it would look like it should do that. We could on the other hand
popup a dialog saying that it's a file of a certain type that we can
import and do it if the user wants.

-- 
Imendio HB