4.

9 Visualizing the Project

To see and share the project data you reports can be generated. You can generate any number of reports and you can select from a variety of report types and output formats. To have a report generated after the project scheduling has been completed, you need include a report definition into the project description. Report definitions are properties that are very similar to the task and resource properties that you are already familiar with. Just like these, report definitions can be nested to take advantage of the attribute inheritance mechanism. Every report definition starts with the type of the report. Each type of report has a particular focus. A taskreport lists the project data in the form of a task list. A resourcereport does the same in form of a resource list. For a more generic report, you can use the textreport. A textreport does not directly present the data in form of a task or resource list. It just consists of text building blocks that are described by Rich Text. There can be a building block at the top and bottom, as well as three columns in the center. The column are called left, center and right. For our first report, we'll just use the center column for now. Like every property, you need to specify a name. This name will be the base name of the generated report file. Depending on the output format, the proper suffix is appended. For this report, we only chose to generate a web page in HTML format. There is no default format defined for reports. If the formats attribute is not specified, no output file will be generated for the report specification. This may seem odd at first glance since TaskJuggler syntax always tries to use the most compact and readable syntax for the common case. As you will see in a minute, reports may be composed of several report specifications. One report specification can include the output of another report specification as well. In this case, the included report does not need to generate it's own file. The output will be included within the output of another report specification. In case of such composed reports, the output format specification of the top-level format will be used for all included reports as well.