How to export the start date and time in MS Project?

Question

I am working with Progress 4gl(11.7) version where I came across a scenario where We are doing Job/task export from application to MS project. Everything is working fine but we have a problem in Percentage Complete where if the job/task duration is 1.5 days after exporting to MS Project its calculating 2 days which is changing the Percent Complete automatically. So I figured may be as we are exporting only date not time, calculation is also happening in Dates.

Now I tried to export the time as well in the start and end date. This is what I have tried

DEF VAR objPrj       AS COM-HANDLE NO-UNDO.
DEF VAR objActivePrj AS COM-HANDLE NO-UNDO.

CREATE "MSProject.Application" objPrj. /*Created a project object*/
objActivePrj = objPrj:ActiveProject(). /*Activated the project*/

objActiveTask = objActivePrj:Tasks:ADD("", vTaskId).  /*Add the Task*/
objActiveTask = objActivePrj:Tasks:Item(vTaskId).  /*Add the Task ID*/
objActiveTask:START  = DATETIME("05-30-2020 03:30 pm"). /*Added hardcoded date and time*/

which is working perfectly fine I am able to export this time in the MS Project.

Now if I do the similar assignment something like

objActiveTask:START  = DATETIME(STRING(02/24/24,"99-99-9999") + " " +  STRING(15:00, "HH:MM:SS"))

Where STRING(02/24/24,"99-99-9999") will be replaced by date variable and STRING(15:00, "HH:MM:SS") will be replaced by time variable.

The time and date is exporting but its exporting wrong like 02/29/2024 00:00 in MS project.

What could we do to export the time and the date correctly? If you have worked on any kind MS project Exporting Program please guide me. Thank you very much.

Answer 1

You could replace STRING(15:00, "HH:MM:SS") with "15:00".

See example in ABL Dojo.

Answer 2

In your hard-coded case you have:

objActiveTask:START = DATETIME("05-30-2020 03:30 pm").

You say that that works, so I will trust that it does.

Your "something like" case that doesn't work looks like this:

objActiveTask:START = DATETIME(STRING(02/24/24,"99-99-9999") + " " +  STRING(15:00, "HH:MM:SS")).

Which does not compile (so it is a mystery how you get a wrong export - you should get nothing at all...). The main problem that I see in the code that you have shared is that 15:00 is not a valid constant. Time values are integer seconds since midnight. So "15:00" should be (( 15 * 3600 ) + ( 0 * 60 ) + 0 )

thus the code should be:

objActiveTask:START = DATETIME(STRING(02/24/24,"99-99-9999") + " " + STRING(15 * 3600 + 0 * 60 + 0, "HH:MM:SS")).

That isn't "wrong" but it would be cleaner to skip all of the string building and just use the date & time directly. DATETIME() supports DATETIME( date, milliseconds ) so a cleaner statement would be:

DATETIME( 02/24/24, ( 15 * 3600 + 0 * 60 + 0)  * 1000 )

or, perhaps:

objActiveTask:START = DATETIME( TODAY, TIME * 1000 ).

or, even:

objActiveTask:START = NOW.

Answer 3

Any reason why you don't want to use this variant of the DATETIME function?

DATETIME ( month , day , year , hours , minutes 
       [ , seconds[ , milliseconds]] )