<chapter id="tutorial"><title>Tutorial: Your First Project</title>

<para>We have mentioned already that TaskJuggler uses plain text files
that describe the project to schedule it. As you will see now, the
syntax of these files is easy to understand and very intuitive. This
chapter will walk you step by step through your first project. You
create the project plan for a made-up accounting software project.
Refer to <xref linkend="example"/> for a full listing of the
example. This project demonstrates some of the basic features of
TaskJuggler; for more advanced features please refer to <xref
linkend="reference"/>.</para>

<sect1 id="starting_the_project"><title>Starting the project</title>

<para>To start a TaskJuggler project file you need to use the
<link linkend="PROPERTY_project">project</link> property.</para>

<para><screen>
project acso "Accounting Software" "1.0" 2002-01-16 - 2002-04-26 {
  now 2002-03-04
  timeformat "%Y-%m-%d"
  currency "EUR"
  scenario plan "Plan" {
    # Mark all paths as critical that have less than 10% slack time.
    minslackrate 10.0
    scenario delayed "Delayed"
  }
}
</screen></para>

<para>It tells TaskJuggler the default project ID, a short name for
your project, a version number and a start and end date. The start and
end dates don't need to be exact, but must enclose all tasks. They
specify the time interval the TaskJuggler scheduler will use to fit
the tasks in. So, make it large enough for all your tasks to fit in.
But don't make it too large, because this will result in longer scheduling
times and higher memory consumption.</para>

<para>All TaskJuggler properties have a certain number of fixed
attributes and a set of optional attributes. Optional attributes are
always enclosed in curly braces. In this example we use the optional
attributes <link linkend="PROPERTY_now">now</link> to set the current
day for the scheduler to another value than to the moment your invoke
TaskJuggler. We pick a day in the specified project period and we will
always get the same results of a TaskJuggler run, no matter when
we process our first project. The <link
linkend="PROPERTY_currency">currency</link> attribute specifies the
unit of currency values.</para>

<para>Because each culture has it's own way of specifying dates, the
format is configurable. Use the <link
linkend="PROPERTY_timeformat">timeformat</link> attribute to specify
the default format. This is the format used for reports. It's not the
format that you use in TaskJuggler project files. This format is fixed
and must be Year-Month-Day-Hours:Minutes:Seconds-Timezone. All values
after day are optional.</para>

<para>In this tutorial we would like to compare two scenarios of the
project. The first scenario is the one that we have planned. The
second scenario is how it really happened. The two scenarios have the
same task structure, but the start and end dates of the task may vary.
In reality we assume that the project got delayed, so we call the
second scenario "Delayed". The <link
linkend="PROPERTY_scenario">scenario property</link> is used to specify
the scenarios. The delayed scenario is nested into the plan scenario.
This tells TaskJuggler to use all values from the plan scenario also
for the delayed scenario unless the delay scenario has it's own
values. We'll see further below, how to specify values for a
scenario.</para>

<para>Certain attributes are scenario specific. These have to be
included in the scenario definition. In this example, we use the <link
linkend="PROPERTY_minslackrate">minslackrate</link> attribute to
specify the percentage of slack time a task path must at least have
before it is considered a critical path. Tasks on critical paths are
marked with a red frame in the graphical user interface.</para>

</sect1>
<sect1 id="global_attributes"><title>Global Attributes</title>

<para>Besides finding suitable start and end dates of our project, we
also like to do a simple profit and loss analysis. So we have to
specify the default daily costs of an employee. This can be changed
for certain employees later, but it illustrates an important concept
of TaskJuggler &ndash; inheritance of attributes. In order to reduce the size
of the TaskJuggler project file to a readable minimum,
properties inherit many optional attributes from their enclosing
scopes. We'll see further below, what this actually means. Here we are at
top-level scope, so this is the default for all following
properties.</para>

<para><screen>
rate 310.0
</screen></para>

<para>The <link linkend="PROPERTY_rate">rate</link> attribute can be used to
specify the daily costs of resources. All subsequent resources will
have this rate unless specified differently.</para>

<para>You might also want to tell TaskJuggler about holidays that
affect all resources. Global vacations are periods where TaskJuggler
does not do any resource assignments to tasks.</para>

<para><screen>
# Register Good Friday as a global holiday for all resources.
vacation "Good Friday" 2002-03-29
</screen></para>

<para>Use the <link linkend="PROPERTY_vacation_global">vacation</link>
attribute to define a global vacation. Global vacations must have
a name and a date or date range. This is slightly different from
vacations of individual resources. They are defined with the <link
linkend="PROPERTY_vacation_resource">vacation</link> attribute for
resources and are unnamed.</para>

<para>Macros are another TaskJuggler feature to keep project files
small. Macros are text patterns that can be defined once and inserted
multiple times in the project file. A macro always has a name and the
text pattern is enclosed by square brackets. </para>

<para><screen>
macro allocate_developers [
  allocate dev1
  allocate dev2 { limits { dailymax 4h } }
  allocate dev3
]
</screen></para>

<para>To use the macro you simply have to write
<computeroutput>${allocate_developers}</computeroutput> and TaskJuggler will
replace the term <computeroutput>${allocate_developers}</computeroutput> with
the pattern. We will use this macro further below in the example and then
explain the meaning of the pattern.</para>

</sect1>
<sect1 id="declaring_resources"><title>Declaring Resources</title>

<para>A TaskJuggler feature that you will probably make heavy use of
is <link linkend="PROPERTY_flags">flags</link>. Once declared you can attach
them to many properties. When you generate reports of the TaskJuggler
results, you can use the flags to filter out information and limit the
report to exactly those details that you want to have included.</para>

<para><screen>
flags team

resource dev "Developers" {
  resource dev1 "Paul Smith" { rate 330.0 }
  resource dev2 "S&eacute;bastien Bono"
  resource dev3 "Klaus M&uuml;ller" { vacation 2002-02-01 - 2002-02-05 }

  flags team
}
resource misc "The Others" {
  resource test "Peter Murphy" { limits { dailymax 6.4h } rate 240.0 }
  resource doc "Dim Sung" { rate 280.0 }

  flags team
}
</screen></para>

<para>This snippet of the example shows the <link
linkend="PROPERTY_resource">resource</link> property. Resources always
have an ID and a Name. IDs may only consist of ASCII characters,
numbers and the underline character. All global TaskJuggler properties
have IDs. They need to be unique within their property class. The ID
is necessary so that we can reference the property again later without
having to write the potentially much longer name. Names are
strings and as such enclosed in double quotes.  Strings may contain
any character, even non-ASCII characters. As you can see, resource
properties can be nested: <computeroutput>dev</computeroutput> is a
virtual resource, a team that consists of three other resources.</para>

<para><computeroutput>dev1</computeroutput>, alias Paul Smith, costs
more than the normal employee. So the declaration of
<computeroutput>dev1</computeroutput> overwrites the inherited default
rate with a new value of 330.0. The default value has been inherited from the
enclosing scope, resource <computeroutput>dev</computeroutput>,
which in turn has inherited it from the global scope.</para>

<para>The declaration of the resource Klaus M&uuml;ller uses another
optional attribute. With <link linkend="PROPERTY_vacation_resource">vacation</link>
you can specify a certain time interval where the resource is not available.</para>

<para>Here you need to understand how TaskJuggler handles time
intervals. Internally, TaskJuggler uses the number of seconds after
January 1st, 1970 to store any date. So all dates are actually stored
with an accuracy of 1 second.
<computeroutput>2002-02-01</computeroutput> specifies midnight
February 1st, 2002. Again following the TaskJuggler concept of requiring
as little information as necessary and extending the rest with sensible defaults,
TaskJuggler adds the time 0:00:00 if nothing else has been specified. So the vacation
ends on midnight February 5th, 2002. Well, almost. Every time you
specify a time interval, the end date is not included in the interval.
But the second before the date that you have specified is. So Klaus
M&uuml;llers vacation ends 23:59:59 on February 4th, 2002.</para>

<para>Peter Murphy only works 6.4 hours a day. So we use the <link
linkend="PROPERTY_limits">limits</link> attribute to limit his daily
working hours. We could also define exact working hours using the
<link linkend="PROPERTY_shift">shift</link> property, but we ignore
this for now.</para>

<para>Note that we have attached the flag
<computeroutput>team</computeroutput> after the declaration of
the sub-resources to the team resources. This way, these flags don't get
handed down to the sub-resources. If we would have declared the flags
before the sub-resources, then they would have the flags attached
as well.</para>

</sect1>
<sect1 id="declaring_accounts"><title>Declaring Accounts</title>

<para>The use of our resources will create costs. For a profit and
loss analysis, we need to balance the costs against the customer
payments. In order  not to get lost with all the various amounts, we
declare 3 accounts to credit the amounts to. We create one account for
the development costs, one for the documentation costs, and one for the
customer payments.</para>

<para><screen>
account dev "Development" cost
account doc "Documentation" cost
account rev "Payments" revenue
</screen></para>

<para>The <link linkend="PROPERTY_account">account</link> property has
three fixed attributes: an ID, a name, and a type. The type can either be
<computeroutput>cost</computeroutput> or
<computeroutput>revenue</computeroutput>.
For the analysis TaskJuggler subtracts the total amount of all cost accounts
from the total amount from all revenue accounts.</para>

<para>Accounts can also be nested. Nested accounts may not have a type
specified. They inherit the type of the top-level account.</para>

</sect1>
<sect1 id="specifying_the_tasks"><title>Specifying the Tasks</title>

<para>Let's focus on the real work now. The project should solve a
problem: the creation of an accounting software. Because the job is
quite complicated, we break it down into several subtasks. We need to
do a specification, develop the software, test the software, and write
a manual. In TaskJuggler syntax this would look as follows:</para>

<para><screen>
task AcSo "Accounting Software" {
  task spec "Specification" 
  task software "Software Development"
  task test "Software testing"
  task deliveries "Milestones"
}
</screen></para>

<para>Similar to resources, tasks are declared by using the <link
linkend="PROPERTY_task">task</link> keyword followed by an ID and a name
string. All TaskJuggler properties have their own namespaces. This
means, that it is quite OK to have a resource and a task with the same
ID. Tasks may have optional attributes which can be tasks again, so
tasks can be nested. In contrast to all other TaskJuggler properties,
task IDs inherit the ID of the enclosing task as a prefix to the ID.
The full ID of the <computeroutput>spec</computeroutput> task is
<computeroutput>AcSo.spec</computeroutput>.</para>

<para>To track important milestones of the project, we also added a
task called Milestones. This task, like most of the other tasks will
get some subtasks later on. We consider the specification task simple
enough, so we don't have to break it into further subtasks. So let's
add some more details to it.</para>

<para><screen>
  task spec "Specification" {
    effort 20d
    ${allocate_developers}
    depends !deliveries.start
  }
</screen></para>

<para>The effort to complete the task is specified with 20 man-days.
Alternatively we could have used the <link
linkend="PROPERTY_length">length</link> attribute or the <link
linkend="PROPERTY_duration">duration</link> attribute.
<computeroutput>length</computeroutput> specifies the duration of the
task in working days while <computeroutput>duration</computeroutput>
specifies the duration in calendar days. Contrary to <link
linkend="PROPERTY_effort">effort</link>, these two don't have to have a
specification of the involved resources. Since
<computeroutput>effort</computeroutput> specifies the duration in
man-days, we need to say who should be allocated to the task. The task
won't finish before the resources could be allocated long enough to
reach the specified effort. Tasks with
<computeroutput>length</computeroutput> or
<computeroutput>duration</computeroutput> criteria and allocated
resources will last exactly as long as requested. Resources will be
allocated only if available.</para> 

<para>Here we use the <computeroutput>allocate_developers</computeroutput>
macro mentioned above. The expression
<screen>${allocate_developers}</screen>
is simply expanded to
<screen>
  allocate dev1
  allocate dev2 { limits { dailymax 4h } }
  allocate dev3
</screen></para>

<para>If you need to allocate the same bunch of people to several
tasks, the macro saves you some typing. You could have written the
<link linkend="PROPERTY_allocate">allocate</link> attributes directly instead
of using the macro. Since the allocation of multiple resources to a
task is a very common place for macro usage, we found it a good idea
to use it in this example as well.</para>

<para>One more interesting thing to note is the fact that we like
the resource <computeroutput>dev2</computeroutput> only to work 50% of
the day on this task, so we use the optional attribute <link
linkend="PROPERTY_limits">limits</link> to specify this.</para>

<para>For TaskJuggler to schedule a task, it needs to know either the
start and end criteria of a task, or one of them and a duration
specification. The start and end criteria can either be fixed dates or
relative dates. Relative dates are specifications of the type "task B
starts after task A has finished". Or in other words, task B depends
on task A. In this example the <computeroutput>spec</computeroutput>
task depends on a subtasks of the
<computeroutput>deliveries</computeroutput> task. We have not
specified it yet, but it has the local ID
<computeroutput>start</computeroutput>.</para>

<para>To specify the dependency between the two tasks, we use the <link
linkend="PROPERTY_depends">depends</link> attribute. This attribute must be
followed by one or more task IDs. If more than one ID is specified,
each ID has to be separated with a comma from the previous one. Task
IDs can be either absolute IDs or relative IDs. An absolute ID of a
task is the ID of this task prepended by the IDs of all enclosing
tasks. The task IDs are separated by a dot from each other. The
absolute ID of the specification task would be
<computeroutput>AcSo.spec</computeroutput>.</para>

<para>Relative IDs always start with one or more exclamation marks.
Each exclamation mark moves the scope to the next enclosing task. So
<computeroutput>!deliveries.start</computeroutput> is expanded to
<computeroutput>AcSo.deliveries.start</computeroutput> since
<computeroutput>AcSo</computeroutput> is the enclosing task of
<computeroutput>deliveries</computeroutput>. Relative task IDs are a
little bit confusing at first, but have a real advantage over absolute
IDs. Sooner or later you want to move tasks around in your project and
then it's a lot less likely that you have to fix dependency
specifications of relative IDs.</para>

<para>The software development task is still too complex to specify it
directly. So we split it further into subtasks.</para>

<para><screen>
  task software "Software Development" {
    priority 1000
    task database "Database coupling"
    task gui "Graphical User Interface"
    task backend "Back-End Functions"
  }
</screen></para>

<para>We use the <link linkend="PROPERTY_priority">priority</link>
attribute to mark the importance of the tasks. 500 is the default
priority of top-level tasks. Setting the priority to 1000 marks the
task as most important task, since the possible range is 1 (not
important at all) to 1000 (ultimately important).
<computeroutput>priority</computeroutput> is an attribute that is
handed down to subtasks if specified before the subtasks' declaration.
So all subtasks of <computeroutput>software</computeroutput> have a
priority of 1000 as well, unless they have their own priority
definition.</para>

<para><screen>
  task database "Database coupling" {
    effort 20d
    depends !!spec
    allocate dev1, dev2
  }
</screen></para>

<para>The work on the database coupling should not start before the
specification has been finished. So we again use the <link
linkend="PROPERTY_depends">depends</link> attribute to let TaskJuggler
know about this. This time we use two exclamation marks for the
relative ID. The first one puts us in the scope of the enclosing
<computeroutput>software</computeroutput> task. The second one is to
get into the <computeroutput>AcSo</computeroutput> scope that contains
the <computeroutput>spec</computeroutput> tasks. This time we allocate
resources directly without using a macro.</para>

<para><screen>
  task gui "Graphical User Interface" {
    effort 35d
    delayed:effort 40d
    depends !database, !backend
    allocate dev2, dev3
  }
</screen></para>

<para>TaskJuggler can schedule your project for two different
scenarios. We have called the first scenario "plan" scenario
and the second "delayed" scenario. Many of the reports allow you to
put the values of both scenarios side by side to each other, so you
can compare the two scenarios. All scenario-specific values
that are not explicitly stated for the delayed scenario are taken from
the plan scenario. So the user only has to specify the values that
differ in the delayed scenario. The two scenarios must have the same
task structure and the same dependencies. But the start and end dates
of tasks as well as the duration may vary. In the example we have
planned the work on the graphical user interface to be 35 man-days. It
turned out that we actually needed 40 man-days. By prefixing the start
effort attribute with <computeroutput>delayed:</computeroutput>, the
effort value for the delayed scenario can be specified.</para>

<para><screen>
  task backend "Back-End Functions" {
    effort 30d
    complete 95
    depends !database, !!spec
    allocate dev1
    allocate dev2
  }
</screen></para>

<para>By default, TaskJuggler assumes that all tasks are on schedule.
Sometimes you want to generate reports that show how much of a task
has actually been completed. TaskJuggler uses the current date for
this, unless you have specified another date using the <link
linkend="PROPERTY_now">now</link> attribute. If a task is ahead of
schedule or late, this can be specified using the <link
linkend="PROPERTY_complete">complete</link> attribute. This specifies how
many percent of the task have been completed up to the current date.
In our case the back-end implementation is slightly ahead of schedule
as we will see from the report.</para>

<para><screen>
  task test "Software testing" {

    task alpha "Alpha Test" {
      effort 1w
      depends !!software
      allocate test, dev2
    }

    task beta "Beta Test" {
      effort 4w
      depends !alpha
      allocate test, dev1
    }
  }
</screen></para>

<para>The software testing task has been split up into an alpha and a
beta test task. The interesting thing here is, that efforts can not
only be specified as man-days, but also man-weeks, man-hours, etc. By
default, TaskJuggler assumes a man-week is 40 man-hours or 5 man-days.
These values can be changed using the <link
linkend="PROPERTY_dailyworkinghours">dailyworkinghours</link>
attribute.</para>

<para>Let's go back to the outermost task again. At the beginning of
the example we stated that we want to credit all development work to
one account with ID <computeroutput>dev</computeroutput> and all
documentation work to the account
<computeroutput>doc</computeroutput>. To achieve this, we use the
attribute <computeroutput>account</computeroutput> to credit all tasks to the
<computeroutput>dev</computeroutput> account.</para>

<para><screen>
task AcSo "Accounting Software" {

  account dev

  task software "Software Development" {
</screen></para>

<para>Since we specify the attribute for the top-level task before we
declare any subtasks, this attribute will be inherited by all subtasks
and their subtasks and so on. The only exception is the
writing of the manual. We need to change the account for this task
again, as it is also a subtask of
<computeroutput>AcSo</computeroutput>.</para>

<para><screen>
  task manual "Manual" {
    effort 10w
    depends !deliveries.start
    allocate doc, dev3
    account doc
  }
</screen></para>

</sect1>
<sect1 id="specifying_milestones"><title>Specifying Milestones</title>

<para>All tasks that have been discussed so far, had a certain duration. We
did not always specify the duration explicitly, but we expect them to
last for a certain period of time. Sometimes you just want to capture
a certain moment in your project plan. These moments are usually
called milestones, since they have some level of importance for the
progress of the project.</para>

<para>TaskJuggler has support for milestones as well. They are handled
as special types of tasks. By using the optional attribute
<link linkend="PROPERTY_milestone">milestone</link> for a task, this task
is declared a milestone. Milestones have no duration, so it's illegal
to specify any duration criteria, or a non identical start and end
date.</para>

<para><screen>
  task deliveries "Milestones" {

    account rev

    task start "Project start" {
      milestone
      start 2002-01-16
      delayed:start 2002-01-20
      startcredit 33000.0
    }

    task prev "Technology Preview" {
      milestone
      depends !!software.backend
      startcredit 13000.0
    }

    task beta "Beta version" {
      milestone
      depends !!test.alpha
      startcredit 13000.0
    }

    task done "Ship Product to customer" {
      milestone
      # maxend 2002-04-17
      depends !!test.beta, !!manual
      startcredit 14000.0
    }
  }
}
</screen></para>

<para>We have put all important milestones of the project as subtasks
of the <computeroutput>deliveries</computeroutput> task. This way they
show up nicely grouped in the reports. All milestones either have a
dependency or a fixed start date. For the first milestone we have used
the attribute <link linkend="PROPERTY_start">start</link> to set a fixed
start date. All other tasks have direct or indirect dependencies on
this task. Moving back the start date will slip the whole project.
This has actually happened, so we use the
<computeroutput>delayed:</computeroutput> prefix again to specify the
start date for the delayed scenario.</para>

<para>Every milestone is linked to a customer payment. By using the
<link linkend="PROPERTY_startcredit">startcredit</link> attribute we can
credit the specified amount to the account associated with this task.
Since we have assigned the <computeroutput>rev</computeroutput>
account to the enclosing task, all milestones will use this account as
well.</para>

<para>Did you notice the line in the task
<computeroutput>done</computeroutput> that starts with a hash? This
line is commented out. If TaskJuggler finds a hash, it ignores the rest
of the line. This way you can include comments in your project. The
<link linkend="PROPERTY_maxend">maxend</link> attribute specifies that the
task should end no later than the specified date. This information is
not used for scheduling, but only for checking the schedule afterwards.
Since the task will end later than the specified date, commenting out
the line would trigger a warning.</para>

<para>Now the project has been completely specified. Stopping here would
result in a valid TaskJuggler file that could be processed and
scheduled. But no reports would be generated to visualize the
results.</para>

</sect1>
<sect1 id="generating_reports_of_the_scheduled_projects"><title>Generating Reports of the scheduled Project</title>

<para>TaskJuggler offers a number of report types. Probably the most
popular ones are interactive reports and HTML reports.</para>

<sect2 id="generating_interactive_reports"><title>Generating
Interactive Reports</title>

<para>Interactive reports are only available in the TaskJuggler GUI. The
command line version will just ignore interactive report definitions.
To view a <link linkend="PROPERTY_taskreport">task report</link> in
the GUI, you have to add the following lines to your project. This
will give you a list of all the project's tasks and the classical
Gantt chart.</para>

<para><screen>
taskreport "Gantt Chart" {
  headline "Project Gantt Chart"
  columns hierarchindex, name, start, end, effort, duration, chart
  timeformat "%a %Y-%m-%d"
  loadunit days
  hideresource 1
}
</screen></para>

<para>The GUI requires the <computeroutput>name</computeroutput>
column to be present in the report. If you don't specify it, it will
be added automatically. It does not support any of the index columns.
They will not be shown in the GUI.  Nonetheless, it's a good idea to
request it, as the printed version of the interactive reports behave
like the other reports. They only show specified columns. The printed
reports repeat the first column on every page in case it does not fit
on a single page. To print a report from the GUI just select
<computeroutput>File->Print</computeroutput> from the menu or
click the printer icon in the toolbar.</para>
	
<para>For this report we like to have the abbreviated weekday in front
of the date. <computeroutput>%a</computeroutput> is the tag for this.
See the <link linkend="PROPERTY_timeformat">manual</link> for a
complete list of all options.</para>

<para>We don't want to see any resources in this report, so we hide
them all. 1 means always hide a resource. To show all resources we could write a
0, which means never hide a resource. Or we could write a logical
expression that only shows the leaf resources and sorts them by name
as we did for the next report. It's a list of all tasks showing the
resources assigned to each task.</para>

<para><screen>
taskreport "Task Usage" {
  headline "Task Usage Report"
  columns hierarchindex, name, start, end, effort { title "Work" }, duration,
    cost, revenue
  timeformat "%Y-%m-%d"
  loadunit days
  hideresource ~isLeaf()
  sortresources nameup
}
</screen></para>

<para>The default title for the
<computeroutput>effort</computeroutput> column is replaced with a
custom title. Additionally we show the cost and revenue of all tasks
and resources. All loads are shown as resource-days.</para>

<para>The next report is similar to the first one, but has the
completion degree as additional column.</para>

<para><screen>
# A list of all tasks with the percentage complete for each task
taskreport "Tracking Gantt" {
  headline "Tracking Gantt Chart"
  columns hierarchindex, name, start, end, effort { title "Work" }, duration,
    completed, chart
  timeformat "%a %Y-%m-%d"
  loadunit days
  hideresource 1
}
</screen></para>

<para>We can also have resource-centric reports. This is done with the
report type <link
linkend="PROPERTY_resourcereport">resourcereport</link>. The following
report is showing resource allocation. It identifies whether each
resource is under- or over-allocated for.</para>

<para><screen>
resourcereport "Resource Graph" {
  headline "Resource Allocation Graph"
  columns no, name, rate, utilization, freeload, chart
  loadunit days
  hidetask 1
}
</screen></para>

<para>The next report is a list of all project resources, both human
and material resources, together with the associated costs.</para>

<para><screen>
resourcereport "Resource Sheet" {
  headline "Resource Sheet"
  columns no, name, efficiency, id, maxeffort, rate
  loadunit days
  hidetask 1
}
</screen></para>

<para>The next report is similar to the previous one, but also lists
the tasks for each of the resources. It also provides details about
the cost for each resource and task.</para>

<para><screen>
# A list of resources and each task associated with each resource.
resourcereport "Resource Usage" {
  headline "Resource Usage Report"
  columns no, name, utilization, freeload, cost
  loadunit days
  hidetask 0
}
</screen></para>

</sect2>
<sect2 id="generating_html_reports"><title>Generating HTML Reports</title>

<para>In addition to the interactive reports, TaskJuggler also
provides HTML reports. These reports have the benefit that you can
create report files that you can publish on a web server. TaskJuggler
supports a variety of HTML reports. Please refer to the manual for a
full list. In this tutorial we will only cover a subset of them.</para>

<para>The first HTML report looks like a regular calendar. It lists
all ongoing tasks for each day.</para>

<para><screen>
# This report looks like a regular calendar that shows the tasks by
# their dates.
htmlweeklycalendar "Calendar.html" {
}
</screen></para>

<para>The next HTML report is a weekly status report. You can generate
such a report each week to update your team, your management, and your
clients about the current project status. The report lists all the
events of the recent week and all upcoming new tasks for the next
week.</para>

<para><screen>
# This report is a status report for the current week. It also
# provides an outlook for the next week.
htmlstatusreport "Status-Report.html" {
}
</screen></para>

<para> To conclude the HTML reports, a report is generated that shows
how poorly the project is calculated. The company won't get rich with this
project. Due to the slip, it actually needs a loan from the bank
to pay the salaries.</para>

<para><screen>
htmlaccountreport "Accounting.html" {
  columns no, name, scenario, total, monthly
  headline "P&amp;L for the Project"
  caption "The table shows the profit and loss analysis as well as
           the cashflow situation of the Accounting Software Project."
  accumulate
  scenarios plan, delayed
}
</screen></para>

<para>The <link linkend="PROPERTY_htmlaccountreport">htmlaccountreport</link>
property produces similar reports as the ones shown above, but it lists
accounts instead of tasks or resources. The
<computeroutput>total</computeroutput> column shows the value of the
account at the end of the reported time interval. The <link
linkend="PROPERTY_accumulate">accumulate</link> attribute
puts the calendar in accumulation mode. The monthly columns list the
value of the account at the end of the month. Normally the amount that
has been added or subtracted from the account would be listed.</para>

</sect2>
</sect1>
</chapter>
