Reading and Writing General Properties

Tasks can be identified by a number of general properties, such as name, ID, start and finish date. Aspose.Tasks can be used to get and set task properties when working with projects.

General Properties

The Task exposes several general properties:

• Name, used to set and get a task’s name (string).
• Id, used to set and get a task’s ID (integer).
• Uid, used to set and get a task’s unique ID (integer).
• Start, used to set and get a task’s start date (DateTime).
• Finish, used to set and get a task’s end date (DateTime).

To view a task’s general properties in Microsoft Project:

1. Open a project.
2. On the View menu, select More Views and then Task Entry to open the task entry form.
3. From the Insert menu, select Column and add the ID and Unique ID as shown in the screenshot below.

Task general properties view in Microsoft Project

Setting General Properties

To set the properties shown in the screenshot above, use the code below.

// For complete examples and data files, please go to https://github.com/aspose-tasks/Aspose.Tasks-for-Java
// The path to the documents directory.
String dataDir = Utils.getDataDir(ReadWriteGeneralProperties.class);

Project project = new Project();
Task task = project.getRootTask().getChildren().add("Task1");
// Set task start date
java.util.Calendar cal = java.util.Calendar.getInstance();
cal.set(2013, 7, 17, 8, 0, 0);
task.set(Tsk.START, cal.getTime());
// Set task name
task.set(Tsk.NAME, "new name");

Getting General Properties

Get a task’s properties by traversing the children of the project’s RootTask property.

// For complete examples and data files, please go to https://github.com/aspose-tasks/Aspose.Tasks-for-Java
// The path to the documents directory.
String dataDir = Utils.getDataDir(ReadWriteGeneralProperties.class);

Project prj = new Project(dataDir + "project.mpp");
// Create a ChildTasksCollector instance
ChildTasksCollector collector = new ChildTasksCollector();

// Collect all the tasks from RootTask using TaskUtils
TaskUtils.apply(prj.getRootTask(), collector, 0);

// Parse through all the collected tasks
for (Task tsk : collector.getTasks()) {
    System.out.println("Task Id:" + tsk.get(Tsk.ID));
    System.out.println("Task Uid: " + tsk.get(Tsk.UID));
    System.out.println("Task Name: " + tsk.get(Tsk.NAME));
    System.out.println("Task Start: " + tsk.get(Tsk.START));
    System.out.println("Task Finish: " + tsk.get(Tsk.FINISH));
}