The PM Procedure

Saving and Restoring Preferences

When the PM window is displayed for the first time for a given project, the order and width of the columns in the Table View, the font used for the display, the size of the window, the boundary between the Table and the Gantt Views, and several other attributes of the display are determined by the procedure. As you add activities and edit the Table View, you can change some of these attributes according to your preference. You can also select a different level of display or set some activity filters (see the section "Setting Activities Filter").

PROJECT Data Set

PROC PM enables you to save the attributes of the display in an indexed data set that is specified in the PROC PM statement by using the PROJECT= option. The following preferences can be saved from one invocation to another:

• text font
• time increment
• time units
• major time axis format
• minor time axis format
• schedule bars displayed (for example, Actual, Baseline, and so forth)
• chart grid
• chart scale
• table column widths
• table column order
• Table View-Gantt View dividing line
• activity filters
• activity level
• project summary
• window dimensions

The Project data set uses three variables to save the preference information:

• PROJATTR - contains a keyword identifying the project attribute. Each attribute has either a numeric value or a character value. The length of this variable is 8.
• PRATNVAL - used for numeric data corresponding to the attribute.
• PRATCVAL - used for character data corresponding to the attribute. The length of this variable is 200.

You can save and restore the preferences from the Project menu, which contains the Preferences submenu (Figure 3.30). Note that you have to explicitly save the project preferences using the Save selection from this menu. Closing the PM window saves only the activity data of the project; it does not automatically save the project preferences. When you restore preferences, the state used is the one that was last saved for the project in the specified preference data set.

Figure 3.30: Preferences Menu