Driving predecessors not shown when summary tasks hidden?

[Dan Schaeffer]

Does anyone know why turning off summary tasks turns off highlighting of driving predecessors – or more importantly, how to prevent it?

[Dan Schaeffer]

..forgot to check that I wanted email for follow-up replies

[Tom Boyle]

Dan,
I can’t consistently repeat your observation in MSP 2016, so I suspect you are seeing something unique to one view, one project, or to your global template or your installation. Can you repeat the observation on a built-from-scratch simple project? If so, was this built from the default template? (The default template has 40+ bar styles in it.)
The proper display of driving predecessors seems to have two prerequisites:
1. Application setting: The “Driving Predecessors” button on the Task Path pull-down menu is toggled ON (dark gray). This enables the internal recalculation of a hidden task flag for path-driving-predecessors.
2. Current View: A set of “Path Driving Predecessor” bar styles (generally for Milestone, Summary, and Normal tasks) is properly configured and ordered in the bar-styles list for the active view.
Normally, toggling the pull-down button will automatically insert or remove the corresponding bar styles in the current view, keeping the two prerequisites synchronized. If they get out of sync when you change views, then multiple toggles of the pull-down button may be needed to re-synchronize. If repeated mashing of the button seems to have no effect, then check the bar styles list of the current view for issues, in particular:
• Missing task path bar styles. The program only creates a task path bar style if a corresponding bar style of the same default root name already exists. If the existing view does not already contain bar styles “Milestone”, “Normal”, and “Summary” (even if the names are only slightly revised); then the corresponding task path bar styles will be omitted.
• Conflicting or over-riding bars lower down on the list.
Good luck, tom

[Dan Schaeffer]

Tom,

Hmmm. The problem seems to have abated.

What I did…
I created a custom flag column ‘Hi Level’ for which ‘no’ meant I didn’t want to see it. I then created a custom filter to filter on that flag. When I had summary tasks with ‘Hi Level’= yes I was not seeing any chains of driving predecessors. When I unchecked ‘summary tasks’ the chains were restored. So then I set ‘Hi Level’= no for all of my summary tasks and it solved my problem – filtered or not, I could see the driving predecessors.

Today, when I went back to set ‘Hi level’ to ‘yes’ for a few of my summary tasks I found that the driving predecessor chains remained when filtered – regardless of the status of the Summary Tasks checkbox. So maybe I need to find a specific summary task that triggers this, but for now, I can no longer reproduce it.

Thoughts?
Dan

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