GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 137544
Task priority spinner not effective.
Last modified: 2004-12-22 21:47:04 UTC
The task priority spinner is not effective at all. Looking at the code I can see why !. It hasn't got anything ;) nor is there anything in the schema. Easy for me to add this as I've already changed schema for the short-name field so know what to do to make this work for XML and SQL. We should make this work because people using Planner currently have to use something else to do workload balancing/levelling. The priority field would be expected to be used by these non-Planner tools to allow you to define which task loses out when there is contention for resources. Potentially Planner's own future (hypothetically speaking) leveller/scheduler would also need such a priority field. Until Planner gets this, we need a way of signalling how to manage contention to other projects: the priority field is the thing to use at this time. The range should be Default = 1, range = 0, 1...integermax. Planner will not apply any meaning to any value at this time i.e. 0,1 or 9999 have no meaning to Planner. Rgds, Lincoln.
Sounds like a good plan :)
Created attachment 26383 [details] [review] Standalone patch to fix this one bugzilla issue. OK - I've given in and will chop my patches into smaller things. I've just got a lot more familiar with using patch to reverse patches. It works very well. Attached is the Task priority patch. This fixes, http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=137544 (Task priority spinner not effective.) The priority spinner is now effective and gets stored. It was always displayed but never used (I guess never worked in MrProject or Planner). Range is quite arbitarily set to 0..9999. In the future I'd expect 0 to imply no priority defined and 1..9999 to mean a priority. FYI: MS Project 2000 has priority values from 1 to 1000 so we're able to map to/from that as well as potentially have a finer grain when within our own environment. As to wether 1 is high or low is up to the user at this time; planner doesn't use this in any scheduling. WARNING: this changes schema. An old Planner will not read any new files which have "priority" in them (This isn't a bug but how Planner works in its backward compatibility stuff). Why is this important ? - well Planner doesn't have an internal load leveller but there are a number of external ones and people have expressed some interest in external scheduling. You could use the priority field to help tweak how these 3rd party rank tasks for scheduling. Note as mentioned: Planner doesn't yet use this field. Its for discussion - but planner could use this field in the future e.g. if you have TASK 1,2,3 and TASK2 and 3 are both linked to TASK 1 as FS and both use the same set of resources which are now at MAX (100%) then the "higher" priority task out of 2 or 3 should take precedence over the "lower" priority task. But as we know this isn't as easy as it sounds but having a priority field is certainly a very helpful hint to any scheduler as its defined by the Project Manager (human) and they are the best arbitrator of precedence in the end. Rgds, Lincoln.
Thanks a lot, committed!