How to read custom column values from an mpp file using Aspose.Tasks

Question

I'm working on a c# and MVC3 project where I am using Aspose.Tasks to extract data from an mpp file, everything is doing fine - except that I can't find a way on how to read the values of a custom column. By custom column I mean a column that is not listed on MS Project's column names (e.g. Insight, Cyclic, and so on).

I was wondering if anyone here has figure that out and share some thoughts with me? I was hoping Aspose.Tasks would allow me to get column values by column name or column index which would surely solve my problem, but I can't seem to find any way to do that from Aspose's generated properties when reading the mpp file.

Answer 1

Originally the Aspose.Tasks API was similar in some areas to MPXJ. That doesn't seem to be the case now in this particular area, but I'll give you an idea of how MPXJ handles this which may help you to locate the equivalent functionality in Aspose.Tasks.

MPXJ provides the Task.getFieldByAlias() method which will allow you to retrieve the field you are interested in using the user-visible custom column name rather than the standard MS Project name for the column.

There is also ProjectFile.getTaskFieldAliasMap() which will give you the mapping between the user-visible names, and the enumerations used to represent the custom column types.