PPM Gantt in PDF Report - Part 1

Part 1: Introduction

Part 2: XML-based Gantt customizing

Part 3: ABAP-based Chart engine

Part 4: Conclusion

A very challenging, yet interesting task, that my team and I received last year was to “find a way” to export the project Gantt chart from PPM into our very own Project Status Report (that is, an Adobe Form PDF-based file).

Of course, a PPM project can have lots of objects under the project definition, and again other objects beneath each other. For a simple and clear report, we only needed to display the project phases and some particular milestones.

Just as a hint for those who don’t know much about the cProjects Gantt and what technologies stand behind it, the actual component is called JGantt. It is a Java-based separate software component installed and integrated within the Web AS (NetWeaver Application Server), therefore with ABAP Web Dynpro. JGantt is a variant of the JNet control and is based on a specially formatted XML file. With this type of Gantt chart users can change values at runtime. For instance, you can move bars along the time axis or increase the length of bars. This flexibility is made possible by the high complexity of the JGantt control. The UI Element Gantt is one of the UI elements provided in Web Dynpro ABAP and can be found in the graphiccategory. More information may be found here.

As the Gantt chart is always rendered at runtime, it cannot really be exported as an image (that can later be embedded into the Adobe Form), so we needed to find a workaround. In order to achieve this, we made use of the functionality behind the IGS.

IGS stands for Internet Graphics Services and constitutes the infrastructure to enable the application developers to display graphics in an Internet browser with a minimum of effort. Basically, it offers a way to render graphics using the Web AS. More details about this topic may be found here.

As a prerequisite, you need to have the IGS installed and configure.

The IGS offers different types of interpreters, for example, the XMLCHART interpreter. This can generate business graphics using XML-based customizing and XML-based data.

Next part.