System and method for computing and overwriting the appearance of project tasks and milestones

摘要

A computer-implemented system that transforms one or more project plans to create a graphical project view. The appearance of the project view is determined by a default style, one or more style rules applied to each task or milestone in the chart, or both. Once the project view has been created, users may alter its appearance by changing the default style settings, modifying the data-driven style rules, or by manually changing the appearance of selected tasks and milestones to deviate from the default style or style rules. As project plans are updated, the project view may be refreshed to create a new snapshot, or to replace an existing snapshot. As data is refreshed, the system will preserve manual style changes, and will also reapply style rules, which may result in a change to the project view's appearance. Snapshots may have different appearances, based on rules and manual changes.

主权项

1. A computer-implemented method for representing events in a project as a project view, the method comprising:
providing a computer system including a display, non-transient data storage, a processor; and an input device; storing event data containing data attributes pertaining to one or more events in the non-transient data storage, the data attributes having data types of at least one of strings, numbers, and dates; providing a set of style rules, the style rules relating one or more predetermined graphical attributes with one or more of said data attributes; for each of the one or more events, rendering a marker in the project view along a timeline on the display, the graphical attributes of each displayed marker being determined based on at least one data attribute of each event and one or more applicable graphical attributes associated with the data attributes as determined by the set of style rules; a user manually changing the graphical attributes of one or more of said markers to display the graphical attributes other than those dictated by the set of style rules; and updating the event data as pertaining to one or more events; and automatically re-rendering the markers in the project view based on changes in the data attributes except for the one or more markers having manually changed graphical attributes.