Project Online Tasks in Hornbill Project Manager

[Ann]

Morning All

Hope you are all well and had lovely weekends.

Please would it be possible to help/advise?  We have an interface between Microsoft Project Online and Hornbill Project Manager, the tasks created in Project Online are then sent across to Hornbill Project Manager.  Please would it be possible to advise if there is a way of telling if a task has been created within Project Online or Hornbill project manager please?  Thank you.

Kind Regards

Ann

[Steve Giller]

Without knowing how you have this set up it's difficult to advise, but presuming you are using the addProjectTask api then as far as Hornbill is aware this is "just a Project Task" created in the normal way, so you would have to have some information within the Task to identify it.

If you're not using the External Reference field, this would seem to be the easiest option - so a Project Task with an External Reference would indicate it originated in an MS Project Online Project and the content would indicate which specific Project.

Other options might be a Prefix/Suffix on the Name, some identifying content in the Description, etc.

@AlexTumber and his team might have additional suggestions.

[Ann]

Thank you @Steve Giller that is fantastic.  We will certainly look into these being options.  Thank you so much for coming back to us so quickly.

I hope you have a lovely rest of week.

[SamS]

Hi @Ann,

Following from @Steve Giller suggestion:

Most APIs used to create some entity (be it a task, request or whatever), tend to respond with a (unique) reference (ID) to the entity created (or an error message if it goes wrong). Our API works exactly the same way, specifically returning projectTaskId (if all went well). I would imagine that "MS Project Online"'s API works in a similar way.

IF you are worried that tasks are lost (in whichever direction), then I would build in some logging that captures the responses of the APIs (i.e. ideally the ID, but possible error messages as well). Within Hornbill BP the trick would be to output the responses to a timeline somewhere (eg dedicated workspace; Hornbil Collaboration-section in iBridge/Cloud-Automation).

[Ann]

Morning @SamS

Hope you are well.  Thank you for the above information, I am learning so much with the Hornbill application.  Thank you.

We are not concerned that tasks are being lost, our project managers would like to know which tasks are Project Online tasks and which tasks are Hornbill Project Manager tasks and we wondered if there was an easy way for them to tell which system a task is from.

Kind Regards

Ann

[SamS]

@Ann,

If @Steve Giller's suggestion is not working for you, you might want to think about some naming convention within the title/action (i.e. prefixing all tasks originating from Project Online with "PO:", and "HB:"  for tasks within Hornbill).