Milestone Report (Export)

[PritchardBarry]

Provide ability to export milestone data in a basic report that can be read into Excel.

Columns:

1. Programme Name
2. Project Name
3. Milestone Name
4. Baseline Date
5. Current Date
6. Health (R,Y,G,C)
7. Comment

This way the data can be easiliy read into any other tool.

[andymac-2]

See 6e572ec

Note that there is data loss in this format, if we decide to re-import, the process will be difficult and will produce errors.

[PritchardBarry]

Noted. An export and re-import function is not required.

Question though: Could we use a format like this (excluding the baseline date) to do an initial upload/create? This might be the simplest way to import data since most PM's would have a list of milestones?

[andymac-2]

Import and re-import are essentially the same functionality. The reasons that this is difficult:

• CSV only allows a single table. The data in the milestone map JSON file is six tables. There is data loss transferring these six tables into a single table, so when importing data in this format, there is not enough information to recreate all the tables. Some data loss includes the name of the map, the start and end dates, the dates of the reports, all of the reports themselves, all of the dependencies, health of the baseline milestone, the comment of the baseline milestone.
• The CSV data is not normalised. The program can make educated guesses as to the missing data, but this is not perfect. Users would need to have baseline data AND a comparison for all milestones at all times, baseline data by itself would not be sufficient.
• Importing dates is going to be problematic, the program has to guess the format of the date. Excel automatically changes the format from ISO to locale specific. It is ambiguous whether the 02/03/2018 is March 2, or Feb 3. The solution would require the user to be compliant in specifying a particular date format.
• Similar to date importing, spelling mistakes in the health of the product will result in an error, or loss of data.

It can be done, but in the process, users must be warned of these issues before importing data.

[PritchardBarry]

data loss includes the name of the map, the start and end dates, the dates of the reports, all of the reports themselves, all of the dependencies, health of the baseline milestone, the comment of the baseline milestone

I am OK with this. Let's remove the requirement for the baseline date. A simple extract of data would be fine. I have seen CSV imports into other tools and I agree, they prescribe the format of dates and text fields that might have common "delimiter" characters

[andymac-2]

Ref 62b288c