Add date field to report

[JillAc]

Hi I need some help as I've not done this before and need some advice. I hope you'll stay with me through my explanation - I have a Task report that shows columns referring to a certain set of tasks and that works nicely. They are all simple fields that come directly from the task, no custom anything (it took me a while to get the Portfolio Name into the task report but I did it!) - I would like to add a column to refer to the Planned Completion Date of A DIFFERENT Task within the SAME project. This would be by a query that says -- If the Task Name in this project contains "Mail Date" then display the "Planned Completion Date" of that task -- there is only one task in any project that meets the "if" criteria but theoretically it's a one to many relationship and I suspect that's my problem - I *think* I need to create a custom form with a custom field that I put into each task, that links to the date that I'm looking to retrieve (so that the field I need is contained within the task, and so the task report can find it.) 1. Is that logical? 2. If so, what would be the code for the custom field to retrieve the date? 3. If no, any other way to do get this? I will continue to research custom fields but it does make me a bit dizzy. Thank you! Jill Ackerman

[BarryBu2]

Hi Jill, If you have a task report, each row that is returned will be a task, and everything has to relate to that task. So you can pull 'down' information from the project, program and/or portfolio, as there is a direct relationship with the task. If you get funky with collections, you can pull 'up' information that has a many to one relationship with the task (assignee's other than the primary assignee, hours logged, issues related to the task etc). So normally, you'd need some connection between the two tasks (like the task is a sub-task of 'Mail Date', so you can refer to the Parent, or 'Mail Date' is a predecessor of the task). But we can stretch collections a little bit. So collections are when there are an unknown number of things attached to what you're reporting on. But you can actually traverse the hierarchy with a collection. From the task report, I can go to the project and pull the task collection (every task in the project), filter it to just the one I want, and report on that. The following should work for you: displayname=Mail Date listdelimiter= listmethod=nested(project.tasks).lists textmode=true type=iterate valueexpression=IF({name}='Managing Issues', {plannedCompletionDate}) valueformat=HTML Note that normal collection behaviour is to put something between every object in the list - even if it doesn't return data for it. So you would expect a common or a line break per task in the project, even if it only finds one date. To circumvent this, I'm using an entity number (0 width space) as the delimiter. Barry Buchanan Work Management Australia