Activity Links

The concept of Activity Links enables you to establish links between activities (each Activity Link establishes a link between exactly 2 activities). This concept is very powerful and allows you to capture any set of dependencies you might experience in reality. The following chart shows an example of task dependencies (each arrow represents an Activity Link):

Figure 4-9. Tasks linked with Activity Links

Defining Activity Links is done by creating an (outbound) Activity Link, i.e. a link from the source to the destination (e.g. from Task A1 to Task A2). Once an Activity Link is established, openCRX also supports "back navigation" (e.g. from Task A2 to Task A1). If you qualify (outbound) Activity Links, the corresponding Inbound Activity Link mirrors the dependency as shown in the figure below - based on the manually created Activity Link "Task A1 blocks Task A2" openCRX automatically creates an Inbound Activity Link "Task A2 is blocked by Task A1"f :

Figure 4-10. Outbound and Inbound Activity Link

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Anatomy of an Activity Link:

Name of the Activity Link
a short Description of the Activity Link
qualify an Activity Link with Type - many different values are supported enabling you to precisely describe the dependency, e.g. blocks, is blocked by, duplicates, is duplicated by, incorporates, is part of, is child of, is parent of, etc.
Linked activity is a reference to the destination activity

To find out about links between Activities, explore the information that is available in the following Grids of the respective Activity, e.g.

Linked Activities contains a list of all the (outbound) Activity Links and allows you to navigate to other Activities referenced by this Activity
Inbound Activity Links contains a list of all the (inbound) Activity Links reflecting links to this Activity and allows you to navigate to other Activities referencing this Activity