[kplato] projects, subprojects and tasks

[Heiko Evermann]

Hi Thomas,

>Thats odd; its not a subproject and I doubt it shoud be displayed like
>one.
>
>I designed the class structure in such a form that it keeps consistent
>data when adding removing nodes, but when adding removing data means
>that an existing node changes who he is, then thats really odd...
>
>Can someone with project planning experience tell me if a node should
>change who he is according to the children he has?
>

Well, I have had a look at MS Project and at gnome/mrproject. In both 
these programs a task becomes a subproject as soon as it gets some 
children. Child tasks can be generated simply by indenting other tasks.

I would also say that this is the behaviour that does not surprise the 
user. When using a project management tool to think about and plan a 
project, the user should not be forced to decide at once, whether an 
entry is a task or a subproject. One might for example state initially 
that one task is to write a GUI, and later find out that it is 
neccessary to specify this in more detail like dialog A, dialog B, 
dialog C, and still later one might find out that dialog A needs even 
more subtasks. All of which might not be clear in the beginning.

The alternative would be to delete the task, to reenter the same task 
name again as a subproject name, just in order to be able to add the 
tasks. That would really be odd, but that is just my personal view.
But if a node is not allowed to change what it is, then it should be 
forbidden to add subtasks to a task, to enforce the relationships, 
should't it?

>Btw; looking at the docs I see that there is a openDialog on KPTTask,
>that should not be there, KPTTask is a data object and has nothing to
>do with views.
>For the one who wrote that; please read up on the ModelViewController
>design pattern...
>
Well, I am not the one who wrote it. But it is not just in KPTTask , but 
also in KPTProject and milestone, The method is virtual on the node, and 
so this is designed to produce a dialog just by telling the dialog: give 
me a fitting dialog to edit your data. It is not MVC, but it is 
certainly indended to be clever, as everyones code always is :)  Apart 
from that I support Your view that this should be changed.

I just had a look at http://koffice.kde.org/kplato/current.phtml:
Is a merge with taskjuggler still planned?

Regards,

Heiko