Re: [Webcollab-users] deadlines and milestones

[Andrew S. <and...@pa...>]

On Thu, 11 Dec 2003 19:58:34 -0800
"Mark D. Anderson" <md...@di...> wrote:

> Reading the docs, it would appear that if a task is in the "Planned"
> state, it need not have a deadline.
> 
> But in the user interface, it seems that some fixed date deadline
> is required, regardless.
> Plus the db schema says that deadline is NOT NULL.
> 
> I'd like to have the option to not specify a deadline date
> sometimes.
> 

The deadline is there in the screen - yes - but it's ignored in all
computations.  Sometimes it is good to have a preset deadline on a
planned project for when do activate it.  That's basically the logic.

> Furthermore, for my uses, in most cases what i'd rather specify
> is a deadline *label*, which is in common across multiple tasks.
> I guess you could call this a "milestone".
> 
> I would then separately configure the deadline/milestone date
> for that label, and it would apply to all those tasks.
> 
> Perhaps this goal could be achieved through subtask inheritance,
> except that it appears that inheritance from the parent is
> a one time thing at only task creation time.
> Plus, subtasking is really different from grouping into
> a milestone -- the tasks need not have a dependency relationship
> or other connection just to have a common milestone.
> 
> It is also conceivable that this feature could be shoehorned
> into "task groups", by adding a deadline column to the taskgroups
> table. There would need to be related UI changes.
> The justification for "task groups" seems to have been UI issues
> with subtask hierarchy presentation -- an argument that doesn't
> convince me :) -- so I see no particular problem with using them
> in this way.
> 
> Any thoughts?
> 

Yes, well they are fairly major changes :)

Feel free to code them in, though I'm not convinced that I'd want to see
WebCollab go that way.

Regards

Andrew