Task Summary and Group

Task Summary

The Summary task's appearance is determined by its children tasks which are the following properties:

The outline buttons in Task name columns of grid view provide ability to expand/collapse summary task. The outline structure is represented clearly in the Task Name columns of grid view. Tasks with different outline levels will have corresponding padding space. If any children tasks change properties, their parent tasks will be updated and appear similar to the following:

To distinguish the summary tasks from regular tasks you can customize the summary task font.

The tasks in gantt chart are represented as a tree structure, a task could be a regular or summary task. A summary task is an abstract task that some of their property values depend on all their children’s properties. When a child changes its property values, its parent and ancestor task’s properties will also be updated like the following:

StartDate - start date of a summary task is earliest start date of all its children task.
FinishDate - finish date of a summary task is latest finish date of all its children task.
PercentComplete - The percent complete of summary task is the total of finished time divide by total durations of its children.

When the selected task is initialized, the new summary task will be inserted before that task and adopt it as a new child. This new summary task also becomes the child of the old parent of that selected task and will appear like the following:

If the selected task is not initialized, a new child will be created then a new summary task will be added to that index as shown below:

The new task will be added at the selected task index and control will look up the previous tasks to find the nearest initialized task. If the found task is regular task, new task will be adopted as a child by found task’s parent. Otherwise, new task will be adopted by this found task.