Inactive tasks

Introduction

A task has a special boolean field that makes it inactive. It allows user to keep certain tasks in the project plan while disabling their effect on the scheduling. Helpful for example when using a common project pattern for multiple cases so tasks not needed in some individual project can be deactivated while keeping the project's general structure.

Inactive tasks are excluded from the scheduling process so they cannot affect regular active tasks. They don't push their active successors (but still push inactive ones) and don't roll up their attributes (startDate, endDate, percentDone and effort) to their active parents (but still do that for inactive ones).

Activating or deactivating a summary task also toggles the state of all its children. Activating a child task in turn activates its summary tasks and deactivating all child tasks also deactivates their summary task.

Inactive tasks do not affect resource allocation and thus aren't taken into account by the resource histogram.

Visual representation of inactive tasks

The Gantt displays the tasks strike-out in the left part of the grid and gray colored in the time axis part.

Turning a task into inactive

To make a task inactive on the data level, set its inactive field:

// make the task inactive
task.inactive = true

Or use the setInactive method:

// make the task inactive and wait till rescheduling is done
await task.setInactive(true)

/* here rescheduling is done */

On the user interface level it can be done with the Inactive column:

or with the Inactive checkbox in the task editor Advanced tab:

Critical paths feature

Inactive tasks naturally cannot be a part of any critical path so they are never highlighted by that feature.

Rollups feature

Inactive task bars are not displayed on their active parent tasks when using the rollup feature. But inactive task bars are displayed on their inactive parent tasks.

Progress line feature

The feature treats inactive tasks as not started and draws the progress line respectively (line is rendered at statusDate for not started tasks).