Forum Discussion
JaimeStrawderma
6 years agoQrew Cadet
I think I understand what you mean. Yes I would like to pre-load a year's worth of tasks at the beginning of the project creation but I still need each months tasks to be editable. For example, January may have a task that is in progress until June but then in June it needs to be edited to complete.Is that where the automation comes in? Not sure if you can see my snippet below...
- Laura_Thacker6 years agoQrew CommanderI am not sure you are structuring your Tasks correctly given your screenshot. Is your idea that every Task gets repeated every month? Some Tasks may not be completed in a single-month and will "spill over" into the next month.
Have you considered instead a mechanism by which when you complete a Task; it creates the "next-month" task based on when it was completed. This way you only create Tasks for the next month when the previous-month Task is completed. You will not then have thousands of Month-tasks waiting to be used; and you will be better able to control which Tasks have started, but are taking too long. - JaimeStrawderma6 years agoQrew CadetA bit of background...these are national projects that are always ongoing with our company. One individual handles a particular project and will do the same basic 15-20 tasks each month so I envisioned a group of tasks duplicated for each month. If a task in January is in progress, then in February that task can be edited to still show in progress or completed. If it is completed in January it may very well need to be done again in February and would need to be editable. Ideally I am trying to quantify total time spent on each project for each month/quarter. I hope I'm making sense. I can see it in my head pretty well lol.
- Laura_Thacker6 years agoQrew CommanderAre you planning on using the [Start] and [Finish] components of a standard-task table with Predecessors etc?
As an overall approach then; I would build a Template Project with associated Tasks against it. You will also need to a formula-checkbox to identify the Template Project so that other Users cannot accidentally delete it; and then make a custom role so that only the custom role can modify "Template" records (to protect your data integrity even from Administrators).
Build out the Task list, with the same task 12 times (one for each month in the year). Give each monthly same-task a Predecessor of the previous-month's Task so that they can "connect" to each other. You can of course have other Predecessors in addition.
Make sure your Tasks table has a Month-designation (I would recommend using a source-parent table called Months with the Key Field being a [Month] (text) value. Make sure your Months are a multiple-choice list and are shown in the "sort in this order" (not alphabetically). This can impact the way you see data when filtering on that value in another table. Also add a numeric field in that source-table of Months called [Month Order] and number the months in the correct order 1-12). You can then "lookup" this value in your Tasks table which will be important for sorting and grouping.
You will need to decide the finer-points of how you display these records in your Parent-Project record (I would not display 12 month's worth of tasks at the Project Level as that is a lot of data you would not need to display and will clutter up your interface).
Building automations to fully-complete a Task or customized formula-buttons which can allow a User to "complete" a Task easily from an embedded report will make your user journey much more friendly.
I also recommend having a variable in your application for the [CurrentYear] which you set every year. Then build a formula field in your Tasks table called [Current Year] which takes the Year([Start Date]). This will make it much smarter to use reports where [CurrentYear] is equal to the value in the field [Current Year] to make your yearly-rolling reports more automated and not hard-code the filters on your reports. This may be especially important with embedding reports on your Project form layout.
When you create a new Project, you will need to click a [Create Tasks for this Year] CopyMasterDetail button to create all the Tasks for the new Project. You may then need to use a Date field value in the Project by which to recognize which Tasks have been created that should not apply to the Project. i.e. if a Project starts now (July), there is no point having Tasks for January - June. You can trigger an automation to purge these; or build a custom button using the API_PurgeRecords to delete child records which meet a given criteria.
There are probably a handful of other things you will need to decide to get full user-adoption; but these will all help. - JaimeStrawderma6 years agoQrew CadetThis is great. Thank you so much. Now the fun begins.
- JaimeStrawderma6 years agoQrew CadetSo, I had one more thought please...If I have a report of tasks for January on my Task Tab and when January is done, can I send that report to an Archive table, removing it from the Task Tab and then replace it with a blank report for February? Thank you for your time with this!
- Laura_Thacker6 years agoQrew CommanderJaime,
I would not recommend this because it will make historical reporting much more difficult. Instead tag records automatically which are "historical months" and filter them out of your reports. Moving your data around will make it very difficult to "undo" issues/errors in Task completion and cause you reporting headaches.
Consider instead of separate Tabs for each month, using custom form layouts for each Month and allow the User to navigate to a custom-month form while still having the "current" and "last" month on the default form at all times. You will need some formulas that define the records as to whether they are "current" month or "previous" month records. - JaimeStrawderma6 years agoQrew CadetExcellent, thank you!