How to: Create Project Editing Rules For My Team

Note: To create Project Editing Rules you will need LiveProject Project Collaboration. Compare versions.

LiveProject allows managers to quickly and easily create a set of powerful rules for managing which changes and required fields their team can make suggestions on.

The rules can be setup in a few minutes and applied to projects. The rules allows the manager to:

Determine which fields that are editable, and which fields that must be edited.
Specify the conditions that trigger the rule, such as the equivalent to "For new and edited tasks, if percent complete > 0, task must have a resource name".
Create specific messages that are shown to the users when a rule is triggered.

By allowing managers to create sets of rules with multiple conditions and requirements, the possibilities for control are virtually endless.

These are the steps to take to started with your own set of Project Editing Rules.

Step 1: Open the Task Edit Rules window

As a manager, you can setup the rules by either:

In the Explore Server tab, right-click on your project file and select Project Settings > Task Edit Rules tab, or
In a project viewer, right-click and select Project Details and Settings > Task Edit Rules tab

LiveProject comes with a few pre-defined rules that you can examine at your leisure. For now, select Add New Rule and continue to step 2.

Step 2: Defining a new rule

For the purpose of this example, let us setup the rule described above "For new and edited tasks, if percent complete > 0, task must have a resource name".

Give the rule a name, like "Require Resource name if %Complete > 0".
Select the Actions: New Task and Edit Task to which this rule shall apply.
Select the rule: Not Empty. Because this rule specifies that the resource name field cannot be empty.
Select the column Resource Names.

Your rule should now look like this:

Step 3: Setting up the conditions

Select the Conditions tab so we can setup our condition that this rule is only triggered when percent complete is greater than 0%.

Click on Add condition to add a new condition.
Select the field "% complete", with the comparison ">" (Greater than) and the value 0.00

Your conditions should look like this:

Notice that you can easily add more condition to specify exactly when a rule is triggered. For this rule, we are done with the conditions.

Step 4: Defining a message for your team

Select the Messages tab so we can write a message for your team members to react on when the rule is triggered.

As you can see, LiveProject has defined a default message based on the rule defined so far:

Rule 'Require Resource name if %Complete > 0' failed validation.
Reason: Field '#field#' must not be left empty.

However, we will define our own message, so select the checkbox Use custom message, and enter the following message in the textbox:

When the Percent Complete field is greater than 0, it is mandatory to select at least one resource for the task.
Please update #field# and try again.

- Your Manager

The #field# value is automatically replaced with the "Resource Name" - the field that is required to be filled - when the user sees the message.

Your message should look like this.

Click on Done in this dialog and the next, and the new rule is saved and active. Time to test it.

Step 5: Testing the new rule

Testing is simple. Open a viewer on the project file, and try and trigger the rule. In our case, we will add a new task with Percent Complete > 0, and no resources assigned to it.

Right-click on your project viewer, and select "Add new task".
Enter a task name, and a value in the Percent Complete field. Then press Done.

You will see a message like this:

When pressing OK, LiveProject automatically jumps to the Resource Name field for the user to enter a name.

See also:

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