Project Tasks: Why do I need to enter a Task ID?

**CarlR** · 2008-09-11, 10:28 AM

Creating a Project Task, why do I have to enter a Task ID? What's it for? Does it have to be unique?

**Flagio** · 2008-09-16, 02:02 PM

same question here, anyone knows?
It doesn't have to be unique, so what's that the purpose of that field?

**machineghost** · 2008-10-30, 12:09 AM

Let me be the third person to request an answer to this extremely obvious question. And before anyone says RTFM (Read The ___ Manual), I should point out that the Sugar User Guide doesn't even mention project tasks (all it mentions are projects themselves). Furthermore, the help page inside Sugar for the Project Tasks page doesn't even mention the Task ID field (although it does mention pretty much every other field on that page)!

It's somewhat amazing to me (especially given how otherwise well-documented Sugar is) that this non-intuitive required field would get no mention in either the manual, the help file, or this forum. So I'm a bit flabbergasted; hopefully some kind soul out there can help dispel my (and other's) confusion.

**machineghost** · 2008-10-30, 06:56 PM

C'mon ... there's got to be someone out there who knows what the heck that field is for, and is kind enough to tell the rest of us. Pretty please?

**machineghost** · 2008-10-30, 11:44 PM

Wow ... I guess not. Maybe no one knows what that field is for

In any case I'm going to file a bug on it (regardless of what it does, it should at least be mentioned in the help page), and put in a support request to try and find out the answer. I'll post back here with what I learn.

**machineghost** · 2008-10-30, 11:56 PM

http://www.sugarcrm.com/crm/?option=...g=Bug+saved%21
is the bug URL, if anyone's curious.

**machineghost** · 2008-11-07, 11:27 PM

First the bad news: Sugar Corp. evidently doesn't think that having a completely undocumented required field is a problem, as they rejected my bug saying "Moved to a case - will contact you later". Of course, that was over a week ago, and I have yet to either see a case created or have anyone contact me, so by "later" they must really have meant "never" . As a side note, never buy the Community Edition support license unless you really want the Outlook plug-in; you'll get just as much value by flushing your $120 down the toilet (luckily for us a couple of our salespeople do use the plug-in, so I don't feel too bad wasting my company's money).

But things do get better. For one thing, I discovered that task ID isn't really "completely undocumented" after all ... although the documentation for it is so bad it might as well be (and therefore I stand by my bug). The line I found describes the task ID as "a numerical value as the task identification number", which is basically meaningless unless you needed someone to tell you that an ID is a number which identifies something! *sigh*

More importantly, I discovered a solution which completely eliminates all of this Task ID nonsense. It turns out that while the Task ID field is required, it's only required on the client-side, not in the database. This means that if you use the Studio feature to edit the layout of Project Tasks, and you remove Task ID from the module, you won't have a completely idiotic meaningless required field getting in the way of you using Project Tasks. In fact, it will be just like that field never existed in the first place.

So, that discovery certainly made my day, and I hope it helps anyone else who gets stuck on this issue too. This is why I <3 Open Source Software; who needs a competent corporate backer when you can just fix problems yourself?

**dejb** · 2009-06-29, 01:04 AM

Wow. 7 months later and the problem is still not fixed and nobody from Sugar could be bothered to respond. What a big F.U. to the users of the CE from the Sugar Team. Somebody needs to fork this product into something better. If I had it over again I would probably choose something else.