Service Inheritance Behavior

Tasks, summary tasks, and root tasks can inherit their service settings from their parent projects, making it unnecessary to manually set the service for every task and summary task within a project.

Service inheritance follows certain rules:

  • When a service is set on a project, the same service cascades down to all its children. These children will continue to inherit their parent's service setting. If one of these children is moved to a different parent with a different service setting, the child will acquire the new parent's service setting.

  • When a child is specified with a different service setting than its parent, the service setting cascade stops and that child's service setting is preserved. This child's service setting will be preserved even if the child is indented, outdented, or cut-and-pasted under a different parent.

    Note: When service is required, the child's service setting inherits its parent's only in the following scenario after the cascade relationship is broken:

    The child is specified with a different service setting than its parent, the service setting cascade stops and that child's service setting remains preserved. Then, the parent's service setting is modified to another service setting, and the child service setting is deleted. When you click Save, the child will inherit the parent's new service setting as empty field is not allowed. This is designed to minimize your manual effort.

    However, this does not mean that the service setting cascade relationship is resumed. Once the service setting cascade stops, it cannot be resumed. Even if you modify the parent's service setting to a different one at this time, the child's new service setting is preserved.

  • In the case of a child with a different service setting, manually setting that child's service setting to that of its parent means that its service setting will no longer be preserved, and will become that of its current parent.

  • Manually setting a child's service to an empty value will keep it empty, but it will not stay empty if the child is moved to a parent with a non-empty service setting.

  • If a summary task's parent changes its service setting, the new service will be applied to the summary task and all its children as well, unless the summary task's service setting is different than its parent's, in which case the summary task and its children will remain untouched.

Additional rules regarding service inheritance behavior:

  • In Project Management controlled mode, when services are synchronized, if a child's service is empty in PPM, it will remain empty in Microsoft Project.

  • In Microsoft Project controlled mode and shared controlled mode, when services are synchronized, if a child's service is empty in Microsoft Project, that child's service will inherit its parent's service in PPM.