Well for the past few months I have been contracting out on an interesting and challenging Flex application that is a part of a bigger site, projectmanager.com (not live yet). I was asked to build a Gantt Chart/Datagrid of the site allowing the viewing and editing of tasks in a project very similar to Microsoft’s Project. Infact one of the biggest challenges I faced was overriding Flex’s default behaviors to match MS Projects (especially key navigation for the data entry types).

This is why my blog has seen less posts than usual, and the New Zealand Flex User group meetings have been delayed a bit, and my girlfriend has been……..

Another Issue which has been raised on other blogs was the performance of the advanced data grid. And as you can see I have two instances to worry about (with linked selection, scrolling etc) Now this is by no means a simple application, but I found the performance barriers and had to work ways around them which led to the paging of the data. And I can tell you paging a Hierarchical collection (think a tree of tasks) is no easy feat. I look forward to the reports that <vector>’s in Flash player 10’s VM have a huge increase on performance and I may be pushing for the new player to be considered.

The control itself is tied into a much larger .NET website/application using WebOrbs .Net remoting, which bar a few hassles with earlier versions has been hugely successful, allowing me to work alongside the developers and deal with objects and structures in a common way and forgetting about the ushal serialization hassles or the prospect of having to deal with xml. Being RTMP and amf the comunications with the server are tiny in size and very fast to deal with once in the Flex application itself.

All of that out of the way it has some really cool features:

Picking the columns to display, all held in settings

Custom right click menus for indenting, copying pasting tasks etc

The Gantt Chart can have multiple views showing data for comparison ie the planned data verses the Actual data and the baseline (snapshot at a point of time) data.

The graph itself renders linked tasks, milestones and has drag linking

And as you would expect the tasks in the graph are all slider to adjust the timeframes and percent complete, and these all take into account resources holidays and Company working days (project Calendars) for calculations

You can also pull the separators around that separate the Two data views and show just the Gantt Chart or the Data grid, if your just after data entry.

And theres a “Task Information” panel with tabs for manipulating the data that corresponds to tasks.

All very cool Stay tuned for Beta releases soon

Update: Check out http://blog.projectmanager.com/ for more up to date news