Managing Task Durations

Tasks take time, they have a duration. Realistic task durations help give a realistic project end date. Aspose.Tasks allows developers to set task durations in projects.

Working with Durations

The Duration and DurationFormat properties exposed by the Tsk class are used to determine the planned duration and format of the duration of a task:

• Duration sets and gets a task’s planned duration (TimeSpan).
• DurationFormat sets and gets formats defined by the TimeUnitType enumeration.

Duration in Microsoft Project

To see a task’s duration in Microsoft Project one can select More Views and then Task Entry From the View menu.

Setting task duration using Aspose.Tasks

The following examples increases and decreases the task duration to 1 week and half week respectively.

// Create a new project and add a new task
Project project = new Project();
Task task = project.RootTask.Children.Add("Task");

// Task duration in days (default time unit)
Duration duration = task.Get(Tsk.Duration);
Console.WriteLine("Duration equals 1 day: {0}", duration.ToString().Equals("1 day"));

// Convert to hours time unit
duration = duration.Convert(TimeUnitType.Hour);
Console.WriteLine("Duration equals 8 hrs: {0}", duration.ToString().Equals("8 hrs"));

// Get wrapped TimeSpan instance
Console.WriteLine("Duration TimeSpan equals to TimeSpan of 8 hrs: {0}", duration.TimeSpan.Equals(TimeSpan.FromHours(8)));

// Increase task duration to 1 week and display if duration is updated successfully
task.Set(Tsk.Duration, project.GetDuration(1, TimeUnitType.Week));
Console.WriteLine("Duration equals 1 wk: {0}", task.Get(Tsk.Duration).ToString().Equals("1 wk"));

// Decrease task duration and display if duration is updated successfully
task.Set(Tsk.Duration, task.Get(Tsk.Duration).Subtract(0.5));
Console.WriteLine("Duration equals 0.5 wks: {0}", task.Get(Tsk.Duration).ToString().Equals("0.5 wks"));