Reading and Writing General Properties

In Microsoft Project, every task has general properties such as name, ID, UID, and start/finish dates that define its identity and scheduling. With Aspose.Tasks for .NET, developers can easily read and write these properties programmatically when working with MPP or XML project files.

General Properties

The static class Tsk provides access to all general properties of a Task. These properties can be retrieved or modified using the Get and Set methods of the Task class.

Commonly used fields include:

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.

Example: Setting General Properties

The following C# example demonstrates how to assign values to general task properties:

1Project project = new Project();
2
3// Add task and set task properties
4Task task = project.RootTask.Children.Add("Task1");
5task.Set(Tsk.Start, project.RootTask.Get(Tsk.Start).AddDays(1));
6task.Set(Tsk.Name, "new name");

Example: Reading General Properties

You can retrieve task properties by iterating through the children of the project’s RootTask:

 1Project project = new Project("New Project.mpp");
 2
 3// Create a ChildTasksCollector instance
 4ChildTasksCollector collector = new ChildTasksCollector();
 5
 6// Collect all the tasks from RootTask using TaskUtils
 7TaskUtils.Apply(project.RootTask, collector, 0);
 8
 9// Parse through all the collected tasks
10foreach (Task task in collector.Tasks)
11{
12    Console.WriteLine("Task Id: {0}", task.Get(Tsk.Id));
13    Console.WriteLine("Task Uid: {0}", task.Get(Tsk.Uid));
14    Console.WriteLine("Task Name: {0}", task.Get(Tsk.Name));
15    Console.WriteLine("Task Start: {0}", task.Get(Tsk.Start));
16    Console.WriteLine("Task Finish: {0}", task.Get(Tsk.Finish));
17}

Key Notes

FAQ

Q: What is the difference between ID and UID?

Q: Can I update both Start and Finish dates directly?

Q: Does Aspose.Tasks support reading these properties from both MPP and XML files?

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