Monday, January 04, 2016

Finding SharePoint Tasks

IntelliGantt for SharePoint has powerful search tools you can use to quickly find important tasks based on any available column. You can search Text or Numeric (ie. Number, Currency, Percentage, Date and Duration) columns using operators appropriate for the column type. For example, you can search text with 'contains' or search numers with '>'.
You can also pass in the find parameters as a query string to the IntelliGantt url so that important searches can be created ad hoc and shared real time to people.
But let's start with the basics, first. The Find tool is located in the upper-right of IntelliGantt for SharePoint. By default 'All Columns' is selected with 'Contains' as the operator and an empty string for the value. This means every task is shown within IntelliGantt for SharePoint.

'All Columns' uses a text based approach to finding values, so you will see the text based operators available-- Contains, Starts With, Ends with and Matches.

When you type in more than two characters in the Find Value text box, IntelliGantt immediately performs the find action and updates the displayable list of tasks, both in the grid and the gantt. Because this is the 'All Columns' field, every column value for each task is searched to match this value. Numeric fields in this case are treated as strings for the matching.

Dates are supported as a Numeric type to search by. For example, if you select the 'Due Date' column, you can then use numeric operations like '<' or '>' to find dates in the past or the future, depending on your requirement. Pay special attention to the date format when searching with date columns. IntelliGantt lets you choose the date format via the configuration tool. The date you enter into the 'Find Value' must match the selected format.

Purely numeric fields like 'Cost' work as you'd expect, except as just number values. No need to prepend a Cost with the currency symbol. Note in the picture below that the 'Show in Gantt' selection is 'Cost', but we see a 'More Tasks' for task item 2. This is because 'More Tasks' is a Task List that lacks a Cost column name.

Finally, you can pass any column name, operator and value into IntelliGantt for SharePoint by specifying them on the url as a query string.

activeFindName -- defines the column name to use
activeFindOp -- defines the operator to use
activeFindValue -- defines the value to use
Text Operator query string options
  • contains -- text containing the find value
  • startswith -- text that starts with the find value
  • endswith -- text that ends with the find value
  • matches -- text that completely matches the find value


Numeric Operator query string options
  • gt -- greater than
  • gte -- greater than or equal
  • lt -- less than
  • lte -- less than or equal
  • eq -- equal


Some examples
  • ?activeFindName=AllColumns&activeFindOp=contains&activeFindValue=Hello
  • ?activeFindName=DueDate&activeFindOp=gt&activeFindValue=11/11/2015
  • ?activeFindName=Duration&activeFindOp=gt&activeFindValue=2d