Milestone duration

[Former Member]

Can a milestone task have any length duration? It shows on the Gantt chart one way, but is the duration then limited if I had entered something like 25 days?

Thank you,

Wendy

[thomas_berndt]

Hi Wendy,

unfortunately the Gantt is ambiguous in this case: The dilemma is that a milestone is just a task with the respective flag checked. On the other hand a task can have any duration >=0. The decision that was made for tasks with set milestone flag is to display this element with the milestone icon, which is "fixed in size" and cannot be streched to match its duration as ordinary taks can. The implicit assumption seems to be that no one would set the duration of a milestone to more than one day.

I hope this answers your question,

Thomas

[Former Member]

Thomas,

I appreciate your response. Would you see any issues with having a task that is a milestone but also has a long duration?

I think that I had it in my head that all milestones had to be a 0 or 1 day duration. I think this may have been because we did an import from MS Project and that is how milestones from MS Project imported.

Since the system appears to allow for this, a milestone task with a 20 day duration, for example, I think I might want to do it. I was really just hoping to double check my thinking and ensure that I wasn't going to run into a future issue.

Can you think of any issues with this? I think I was just surprised the system let me do it based on our earlier work with the import. We thought it wasn't possible so that is why I am trying to double check.

Thank you,

Wendy

[thomas_berndt]

Hi Wendy,

in MSP the milestones are also with an icon that seems to hint for a duration of zero (or one) day, but it is possible to set the milestone flag for a task of duration - say 5 days - and MSP won't change its duration. Upon import cProjects doesn't change the duration of the tasks. So, I think there are no functional objections from this side.

And as for any future issues with milestones with long durations, here, I neither expect any "functional" issues (as after all the milestone is just a task with flag), but could expect some confusion from the some of the users who aren't aware of this possibility and inspect the Gantt chart and see such a milestone (with its short icon) that seems to block some time...

Best regards,

Thomas