In the first part, let’s explore what are the different ways of reading a MPP file in MPXJ.

Pre-requisite

The article assumes that you have downloaded MPXJ release and related dependencies. If not here are the links for download

• MPXJ - http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=70649
• Dependencies - http://mpxj.sourceforge.net/dependencies.html

Now let’s get back to the original intent of reading MPP files

Lets see the simplest form of reading an MPP file

try {
     ProjectReader reader = ProjectReaderUtility.getProjectReader(fileName);
     ProjectFile projectFile = reader.read(fileName);

     // ... process Project file here
} catch (Exception e) {
     e.printStackTrace();
}

ProjectReaderUtility.getProjectReader(), provides an appropriate Reader class, based on the version of MS Project file. This is the simplest way to read an MPP file. ProjectFile is the class that contains details about the Schedule, we can iterate and extract information from it.

Alternative ways

• For reading MPX file, you can use net.sf.mpxj.mpx.MPXReader
• For reading MPP,MPT file, use net.sf.mpxj.mpp.MPPReader
• For reading MSPDI, use net.sf.mpxj.mspdi.MSPDIReader