dhtmlxGantt is a JavaScript library that allows creating full-featured online project management apps based on Gantt diagram. In the new release, developers have implemented some interesting and useful features such as Resource Management and Right-to-left Mode. In this article we’ll review these and other new capabilities of dhtmlxGantt version 5.1.

Resource Management

The new version of the library provides users with some tools for flexible resource management. From now on you can do more than monitoring the state of the project as a whole. New features allow estimating a particular part of the project and load of human resources involved.

For a better understanding of the idea behind the resource management, you can check the demo or take a look at the screenshot below:

In this example, the resource usage diagram is synchronized with the Gantt chart and located beneath it. Using this mode, you can easily assess the workload of a particular employee. You can check a total load of people and projects which will help to balance the overall resources load. Resource diagrams provide additional info such as completeness, workload, and capacity for each resource.

You can use a particular style to change the appearance of the task according to the human resource that was assigned to it. If you re-assign a task from one employee to another, dhtmlxGantt will automatically change the schedule by adding task’s duration to it.

Right-to-left Mode

You can display the Gantt chart in the right-to-left mode. In this case, the table with tasks and dates will be located on the right side of the app. The elements of the Gantt chart, such as time scale and grid columns will start from the right side of the page.

Layout Improvements and New Configuration Abilities

Developers have removed redundancy in the layout config which allowed to simplify the development process and get the same results with less code. Among the new layout related features, we can note the ability to add an inner horizontal scroll in a lefthand grid.

Starting with version 5.1 you can set max and min width for the grid columns. The new version of the library allows using the drag_project config. If you set it to true, a user will be able to drag a task along with all its subtasks. Besides that, the export methods have got new parameters that can extend the functionality of your application.

Destructors for Gantt Chart and dataProcessor Instances

This feature will be useful for developers that work with JavaScript frameworks such as Angular or React. You can use these new destructors to dispose of unnecessary instances of the Gantt. In general cases, there’s no need to use any destructors since Gantt instance exists the whole lifetime of the page where it’s displayed. But using modern frameworks, you can face some addition routine required to be done. The reason is that the Gantt instance couldn’t be destroyed together with its parent component.

These were all the main improvements we wanted to mention today. To get more info about the new release, you can check the changelog that contains links to documentation pages that describe in detail how you can implement a particular feature in your app.

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