person_id 0 question

Posted on behalf of Mark Graves. Original posting date 2014-11-17.

First, what circumstances will cause an assignment on a task to be returned with a person_id set to 0? We created a couple of tasks using the APIs where we did not assign a member to the task. When we loaded that same task back using the APIs, we found there was an assignment collection on the task with one assignment. That assignment was set to person_id 0. Will all tasks contain one assignment at all times, setting the person_id = 0 if the task has not actually been assigned?

Second, we noticed that the low_effort_remaining and high_effort_remaining properties appear on the task assignment. Does this mean that these values will now live exclusively on the assignment object? Previously, these values existed on the task object. We’re just wondering if you’re going to maintain both of these values or if you’re going to move these properties exclusively to the assignment.

Lastly, we sent in the following, and an assignment was not made to the task:

 {"task": 
{"activity_id":138586,"external_reference":"8705","expected_start":null,"expected_finish":null,"low_effort_remaining":180.0,
"high_effort_remaining":null,"max_effort":null,"is_done":false,"global_priority":null,"project_id":null,"promise_by":null,"latest_finish":null,"name":"8705 -
Development","description":"8705 - (ODY-138608) Change configuration for 7520 and 7530 to use something other than offense
codes","type":"Task","assignments":
[{"person_id":409335,"low_effort_remaining":null,"high_effort_remaining":null,"id":0}],"parent_id":18648973,"parent_ids":null,"id":0}}

Note that we set the person_id property on the assignments collection to 409335. When we looked at Liquid Planner after pushing this into the system using the APIs, no assignment was placed on the task (it showed “unassigned”). But the task was there along with its parent project, so it seemed like everything else worked. We figured if we really got this wrong, the API would error, but it did not. Is this because the feature technically has not been implemented yet? I thought you guys had said before that you had already patched a forward compatible version, so we expected this to work.

Thanks for your help with this!