SharePoint (and Project Server) Shenanigans

I am a Project Server and SharePoint consultant but my main focus currently is around Project Server. I have been working with Project Server for nearly five years since 2007 for a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner in the UK, I have also been awared with the Microsoft Community Contributor Award 2011. I am also a certified Prince2 Practitioner. This article has been cross posted from pwmather.wordpress.com (original article)

Recently you might have noticed that the Project Online OData reporting API has been updated to remove the HTML tags, I tweeted about this last week. So before this changed the data would have look like this:

Notice the HTML tags such as   and </li></ul></ul></ul> in the StatusSummary field. In the PDP the data looks like this in the Status Summary multiline text field:

If you are still seeing HTML tags for projects these will be updated once edited and saved, After making a change to a project custom field and clicking Save on a PDP (this does a Project Summary Publish too) for this example project I then see the following in the OData feed:

As you can see the HTML tags are now removed from the StatusSummary field. So now in your Excel or Power BI reports you will no longer have to either use VBA in Excel to remove these or use a similar Power Query function in Excel or Power BI as detailed here.

The only down side to this change is if you use a report that can render the HTML tags to maintain the formatting set in the multiline project level custom fields on the PDP this will be lost. For example, for PS+ we use a Reporting add-in that maintains the multiline custom field formatting as seen below:

After the update this formatting is lost as expected making the data harder to read:

All is not lost though, if you want to maintain this formatting just using CSOM / JSOM or REST to get the data for the multiline project custom fields. In the example below using the REST (/_api/ProjectServer) API you can see that the HTML tags are still available:

Here the fields are referenced using the Internal Name rather than the Name, for example Custom_x005f_4d0daaaba6ade21193f900155d153dd4. So you will need to update any custom add-ins / reporting tools to get the multiline custom field data from these API’s if you wish to maintain the formatting.