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Creating an Extended Project List

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Happy New Year all! I had a really nice holiday break at the end of December, I hope you all did too. As the New Year has dawned, so have more questions around Project Server 2007 development. I’ve actually been doing quite a bit of development on Project Server for a solution accelerator to Project Portfolio Server. Along with the questions, my solution accelerator has given me a number of ideas for posts, it’s just a matter of having time to get them “down on paper.”

One recurring use case is displaying a list of projects with their start and end dates (or any other basic information about a project like owner). After reading the SDK many people think that you can make just one call to get this information, even though the SDK is pretty good at pointing out you can’t, if you read deep enough. But heck we’re developers, we only read the whole page after something doesn’t work on the first try ( or after we debug it and can’t tweak it to work). The truth is you have to make one call to get the list of projects, followed by one call for each project to get the additional information.

So our first call would be the ReadProjectList… watch out not so quick. ReadProjectList is more intended for administrative application, it requires pretty high security clearances, ManageQueue and ManageSecurity privileges. The correct call here would be to ReadProjectStatus, which will return projects based on the current users permissions. I know, it’s a little convoluted, but don’t shoot the messenger. Here is an example of what that call might look like:

    ProjectWS.ProjectDataSet readProjDs = projectSvc.ReadProjectStatus(Guid.Empty,

        ProjectWS.DataStoreEnum.PublishedStore, string.Empty,

        (int)PSLibrary.Project.ProjectType.Project);

 

Our second call will be to loop on the returned dataset for each project. In the loop we will request the specific information for each project. To get the full dataset for a project we call ReadProject. Here is a sample:

    foreach (ProjectWS.ProjectDataSet.ProjectRow project in readProjDs.Project)

    {

        currentProjectDS = projectSvc.ReadProject(project.PROJ_UID,

            GetProjectList.ProjectWS.DataStoreEnum.PublishedStore);

        curProj = currentProjectDS.Project[0];

        Console.WriteLine(String.Format("{0} Starts {1}, Completes {2}",

            curProj.PROJ_NAME, curProj.PROJ_INFO_START_DATE.ToLongDateString(),

            curProj.PROJ_INFO_FINISH_DATE.ToLongDateString()));

    }

 

 The issue here is that ReadProject brings back the complete dataset, and we really only want a couple extra pieces of data from the Project table. There is a solution, use the ReadProjectEntities method. Think of ReadProjectEntities as ReadProject but with a filter on it, and conveniently a filter that you don’t need to build. If we modified the above sample to use ReadProjectEntities it might look like this:

    foreach (ProjectWS.ProjectDataSet.ProjectRow project in readProjDs.Project)

    {

        currentProjectDS = projectSvc.ReadProjectEntities(

            project.PROJ_UID, PROJECT_ENTITY_TYPE_PROJECT,

            ProjectWS.DataStoreEnum.PublishedStore);

        curProj = currentProjectDS.Project[0];

        Console.WriteLine(String.Format("{0} Starts {1}, Completes {2}",

            curProj.PROJ_NAME, curProj.PROJ_INFO_START_DATE.ToLongDateString(),

            curProj.PROJ_INFO_FINISH_DATE.ToLongDateString()));

    }

 

We now have an extra parameter to deal with called ProjectEntityType. The ProjectEntityType is really useful because you can combine the values together to get groups of entities. For example you could get the project and custom field tables only. Look in the Project Server 2007 SDK for further information on what values can be used as entity types.

I hope everyone finds this useful. Attached is the complete code sample for your consumption.

 

Program.cs

Comments

  • Anonymous
    January 14, 2007
    Hi, Is there a way to get only requeired colunms from Task table? When I use the ReadProjectEntities with entity type = 2, I get the Task table that includes around 100 columns, when only around 10 of them are usefull for me. Thanks, Olga.

  • Anonymous
    January 15, 2007
    There is no Project method that accepts a filter, which is how you would trim the breadth of columns.

  • Anonymous
    May 19, 2007
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    May 22, 2007
    Hi, I'm afraid that this aproach can't be used in environment where is over 1000projects. May i guess that here is non public function whic is used in PWA? Martin Winzig

  • Anonymous
    September 03, 2007
    Hi I am trying to get the project dataset from the custom event handler. But when i make a call to the psi web services it gives an UnAuthorized error. I checked the ContextInfo.UserName, it is the same as my domain username and i have full privilages. The ContextInfo.IsWindowsUser is false, but I tried to set it to true before calling the web services, but still the same issue Please advise what could be the error Thanks Yuvaraj

  • Anonymous
    October 09, 2009
    Is there a way to get the status of the project, that is whether the project is active or cancelled from this method?  I don't see a field like that in the projectdataset.  Am I missing something?