Christian Simms’s Weblog

Besides fixing some minor bugs, the YUI calendar popup is now used for date selection.

A number of improvements have been made:

• when importing csv files, show a preview of the import before actually performing import
• speed up paging through results
• add keyboard shortcuts for moving through results: j is down, k is up, see keyboard shortcuts for details
• admins can click “admin edit” from view item page to override status workflow
• put word “Closed:” at the beginning of all closed statuses, these won’t show up on the dashboard
• when viewing part of an outline (a “hoisted” outline), new items should be added as child of viewed root
• reinstate duplicate checker on name fields when creating new items
• fix caching issues in IE while editing status workflows

Significant improvements were made to the web interface:

• We are now using Yahoo’s UI library. Our popup windows popup faster and are movable.
• A number of keyboard shortcuts were added.

Enjoy!

Some nice feature enhancements:

• added search - on the right hand side of all pages, you can type in one or more words which will be searched in all the data types. Matches are inserted at the top of the current page, so you don’t lose your context.
• project quickstart - if you click on the Welcome tab, you can run the Project Quickstart wizard and have a lot of your project data data be generated automatically — including automatic resource balancing, assuming fixed project resources.

Fixed minor bugs:

• enhance account expired message
• additional created projects did not automatically get organization’s billing settings (causing spurious warning)
• fixed internal version string identification

Several programs that ProjectPipe uses were just upgraded on our servers. This should have no effect on the application’s functionality, except for being a little bit faster. The biggest change was moving from Python 2.3 to Python 2.5.

The server was upgraded this morning with the following bug fixes:

• If you’re viewing a ProjectPipe feed in your RSS aggregator, and you launched an item in your browser, then it sent you to a bad link.
• Keyboard shortcuts were too aggressive and control-c (the standard copy/paste operation) was instead treated as a “create child” inside ProjectPipe.
• The hoist icon in MS IE looked ugly.
• Round-trip export then import of data failed if the data happened to have a foreign key to another table.

Some minor enhancements were added:

• When viewing an outline, the outline numbers are now black so they stand out from the green of the title of each entry.
• When hoisting an outline (i.e., viewing a subtree in a large outline), we now show the complete list of the hidden ancestors so that you can just click on them to jump up in the outline.

When you’re viewing a table, outline or query, there are now keyboard shortcuts to create a new item. See the list of keys here.

The fixed bug was when you had a query with a field condition with two or more negatives and no positives, the query would fail — e.g., status: not fixed, not duplicate.

The server was updated this morning with the following bug fixes:

• support importing OmniPlan projects (but not their native format)
• some tasks with out of order dependencies would fail to export

The following enhancements were added:

• export entity (e.g., task, risk, etc.) can now display graph diagram
• all graph diagrams can be exported as Graphviz dot files — look for the “(dot file)” link

We have just created a web service api for our ProjectPipe product. Our web services api follows the REST style, which means that you do queries and make changes by sending http GETs and POSTs, respectively. You verify that api calls succeeded by checking the http status code — 200 is good and 404 is an error. All output is in the JSON format, which is a simple, cross-platform data representation format with library support available for all major languages.

Below are sample URLs for project test.test:

• /test.test/svc/task - query the task table
• /test.test/svc/task/1 - read task with id of 1
• /test.test/svc/task/add - add a new task
• /test.test/svc/task/1/edit - edit task with id of 1
• /test.test/svc/task/1/delete - delete task with id of 1

One of the great things about REST apis is that you can use any http client to use the api. For example, you can use the curl command to query for tasks:

Below is a python snipped to do the same thing:

If there is an error then the urlopen().read() will throw an exception, that’s the great thing about using http status codes.