Better handling of sub-task imports from Microsoft Project

[LarsKemmann]

ProjectPlan should (optionally?) treat parent tasks as milestones automatically and make those milestone activities dependent on each of the subtasks in the parent task. At the same time, dependencies in the original MPP parent task should be added to each subtask's activity.

Right now, ProjectPlan simply flattens the activity structure when it is imported, breaking the intuitive semantics of subtasks that Microsoft Project uses.

EDIT: Looks like I misunderstood what ProjectPlan currently does. But it still is very different than how I'm intuitively using parent tasks in MPP to define project milestones.

[countincognito]

Thank you @LarsKemmann for the feedback.

Yes, unfortunately ProjectPlan does not have a concept of "subtasks" like MS Project does. The best it can do is convert each subtask to a regular task and then insert the appropriate dependencies so that the tasks line up as expected.

Out of interest, which version are you using? Version 0.7.4 onwards should be able to import an MPP file with the necessary subtask conversion.

For example, a set up like this:

Would be converted to this:

It's not perfect, but it keeps the relationships consistent. You can run the transitive reduction option under the Compile menu if you want to remove the excess dependencies. FYI, there is no strict need to do that, since transitive reduction is performed under the hood anyway every time the network is compiled.

EDIT: just on the topic of milestones - in ProjectPlan it is recommended to use dummy activities (i.e. of zero duration) to represent milestones. They act as convergence points in the Arrow Graph chart, rather like this: