MPXJ
This gem allows a Ruby developer to work with a read-only view of project plans saved by a number of popular project planning applications. The work required to read data from these files is actually carried out by a Java library, hence you will need Java installed and available on your path in order to work with this gem. Once the project data has been read from a file, a set of Ruby objects provides access to the structure of the project plan and its attributes.
Installation
Add this line to your application's Gemfile:
gem 'mpxj'
And then execute:
$ bundle
Or install it yourself as:
$ gem install mpxj
Changelog
You'll find details of what has changed in this version here.
Supported File Types
This gem uses the file name extension to determine what kind of project data it is reading. The list below shows the supported file extensions:
- MPP - Microsoft Project MPP file
- MPT - Microsoft Project template file
- MPX - Microsoft Project MPX file
- XML - Microsoft Project MSPDI (XML) file
- MPD - Microsoft Project database (only when the gem is used on Microsoft Windows)
- PLANNER - Gnome Planner
- XER - Primavera XER file
- PMXML - Primavera PMXML file
- PP - Asta Powerproject file
Example Code
The following is a trivial example showing some basic task and resource details being queried from a project:
project = MPXJ::Reader.read("project1.mpp")
puts "There are #{project.all_tasks.size} tasks in this project"
puts "There are #{project.all_resources.size} resources in this project"
puts "The resources are:"
project.all_resources.each do |resource|
puts resource.name
end
puts "The tasks are:"
project.all_tasks.each do |task|
puts "#{task.name}: starts on #{task.start}, finishes on #{task.finish}, it's duration is #{task.duration}"
end
Entities
The gem represents the project plan using the following classes, all of which reside in the MPXJ module.
- Project
- Resource
- Task
- Assignment
- Relation
A Project contains Resources and Tasks. Each Resource can be Assigned to one or more Tasks. Tasks can have dependencies between them which are represented as Relations.
Methods, Attributes and Data Types
There are very few explicit methods implemented by the classes noted above. Access to the attributes of each class is provided via a method_missing
handler which checks to see if the requested method name matches a known attribute name. If it does match, the attribute value is returned, otherwise the normal method missing exception is raised.
The methods defined explicitly by these classes are:
Project#all_resources
Project#all_tasks
Project#child_tasks
Project#all_assignments
Project#get_resource_by_unique_id(unique_id)
Project#get_task_by_unique_id(unique_id)
Project#get_resource_by_id(id)
Project#get_task_by_id(id)
Resource#parent_project
Resource#assignments
Task#parent_project
Task#assignments
Task#predecessors
Task#successors
Task#child_tasks
Task#parent_task
Assignment#parent_project
Assignment#task
Assignment#resource
Each attribute supported by these classes is represented by appropriate data types:
- String
- Duration https://rubygems.org/gems/duration
- Time
- Integer
- Float
The attributes supported by each class are listed here:
Acknowledgements
This gem includes functionality provided by POI http://poi.apache.org
This gem includes functionality provided by RTF Parser Kit https://github.com/joniles/rtfparserkit