![]() ![]() ![]() A word of caution: it is entirely possible for you to create a plug-in that will crash Merlin when you load it or when you use it to generate a report.įirst, we will look at how Merlin generates reports and where all the necessary files are stored. We will play around with Merlin’s standard features a bit to find out what is stored where. Next, we’ll set up our own report, based on of of Merlin’s standard reports. The report will generate a list of activities for each team member, rather than for just one team member or for the entire team. Internally, Merlin uses XML to store your projects and project data. The advantage of using XML is that it can be transformed into practically any other file format using XSLT. ![]() As you might expect, this is precisely what Merlin does. Merlin’s reporting engine can take an XSLT style sheet and transform the project XML file into some other format.Ĭonsider for example the “Next due Activities” report. Let’s dissect that report and its sources. Please open one of your projects in Merlin and generate a “Next due Activities” report. If terminals are not your thing, you can follow the path using a finder window. Right-click on the Merlin application in /Applications and use “show package contents” to reveal the contents of that application. Do the same to reveal the contents of NextDueActivities.mrept. The file named Report.xslt is the file that drives the report generation process. The object of all this digging was to learn how we could create our own reports, so let’s start doing that now. The remainder of this article takes you through that process.īefore you barge in and change the Report.xslt that we have just found, please consider that that file is replaced every time you update the Merlin application. Also, if we change this file, we will no longer be able to generate the standard reports, which may inconvenience other users on your machine. Instead of changing the standard report, let’s create a copy of the standard report and edit that to suit our taste. Merlin also searches the folder “~/Library/Application Support/Merlin/Reports” for plug-ins. That folder is not scrubbed when a new version of Merlin is released and it does not inconvenience other users to add your own plug-ins there. Suppose we want to create a report that lists the activities for each team member in a separate table, rather than piling all activities into a single table. We will start by cloning the “Next due Activities” report and adding our own content later. Open a terminal to issue the commands below. Don’t forget the -R flag to the cp command, to copy the entire directory and its contents. If you prefer to use the finder, you can create the Reports folder and copy the report with your mouse. Of course, if you generate the report now, it will come out identical to the report that we cloned. We have not actually changed the actual XSLT style sheet yet. Top 10 Merlin Project Alternatives for Windows Compare 98 The SW Score ranks the products within a particular category on a variety of parameters, to provide a definite ranking system. The changes to the style sheet that make the team layout work are quite large. ![]()
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