Activity Inheritance Behavior

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

Activity inheritance follows certain rules (also described in the Financial Management User Guide):

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

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

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

  • Manually setting a child's activity 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 activity setting.

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

Additional rules regarding activity inheritance behavior:

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

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