Any fixes for how date sorting in a project view breaks parent-child relationships?

[JohnMa3]

Hello, We are using a single project as a workspace for our content calendar, and we are using a simple parent-child relationship to capture sub-elements in a content item. Example attached. Some of these columns are pulling from custom forms, including Publication Date. We'd like to sort this in ascending order, but doing so breaks the parent-child relationships. Is there a way to restrict a sort so that it is only sorting those tasks which 1) don't have any children and are not child tasks themselves; and 2) are tasks with children? (I understand some of the parent tasks in my screenshot don't have Publication Date values set. We would be more diligent about that if the sorting worked as desired.) Thanks in advance for any help! John Martins OUC Brown University

[JillAc]

I'm curious to know if there's an answer to this other than viewing it in a calendar (which doesn't work for us because it reverts to Projected Dates even though we want to freeze it on Planned Dates). Also impressed that you can get your social manager to fill this in. I have given up on trying, they prefer Google Docs. Sigh...

[SarahDy1]

I would LOVE to know the answer to this too, especially for filters. We have a lot of parent/child relationships in our project plan so, short of adding in a parent name column (which, if you have subparents to the main deliverable, can get pretty nebulous), it is very frustrating and tricky to organize your view in a more meaningful way. Sarah Dywinski CDP

[VicAl]

Hi John, I've looked at this for a little bit and don't see an elegant answer. What I would do here is create a filter for the tasks you want to see which is basically Parent Tasks or Individual tasks (attached). I would try to keep the individual tasks at the same indentation level as your Parent tasks. So when you apply this filter they're all aligned the same and it's easy on the eyes. Then just click on your date field to Sort them. You'll still lose the child in the view, but if you want to see the child task just click on that Parent task and go to Sub Tasks tab. If you want to identify which tasks are Parents and might warrant clicking into, you can add the Number of Children field below to your View. That's the best I got at the moment. Sorry.

[JohnMa3]

Thanks so much, Vic. I ended up using a very similar solution! I created a filter using the same or related fields, and then coupled that with a column rule on the view to style parent tasks differently. While not ideal, it did work in the short term. Thanks for your time in looking into it! John Martins OUC Brown University

[Doug_Den_Hoed__AtAppStore]

Hi John, I apparently misplaced my original solution for this (it was years ago), but as penance, worked it out again tonight, which I'd like to now offer for your consideration. Let's start with some visuals. This task view includes automatic task indenting , regardless of how the rows are sorted. With that technique in hand, you can then create a report and sort by date, then by WBS within each such date: Combined, the report presents the desired result of both a logical sort and visual indentation: Here is the textmode for the task indentation , which leverages the built in "Indent" (e.g. 0, 1, 2) concept, from a WBS perspective: textmode=true valueformat=HTML displayname=Name Indented valueexpression=CONCAT(IF({indent}=0,"",IF({indent}=1,"> ",IF({indent}=2,"> > ",IF({indent}=3,"> > > ",IF({indent}=4,"> > > > ",IF({indent}=5,"> > > > > ","> > > > > + ")))))),{name}) And finally (albeit optionally), the textmode to concatinate the desired date and WBS in order to visually confirm the report's sort in a single column: textmode=true valueformat=html displayname=Sort by EntryDate WBS valueexpression=CONCAT(YEAR({entryDate}) ,"-",RIGHT(CONCAT("0",MONTH({entryDate})),2),"-",RIGHT(CONCAT("0",DAYOFMONTH({entryDate})),2)," | ",{wbs}) If anyone needs me, I'll be down in the vault, carefully filing this one away (this time). Regards, Doug Doug Den Hoed - AtAppStore Got Skills? Lend a hand! https://community.workfront.com/participate/unanswered-threads