Deltek has released Cumulative Update 12 for Deltek Cobra 8.2. Released on March 7th it contains a number of bug fixes, including some performance improvements where it matters which will be welcome news to all Deltek Cobra users. Let’s take a look at what’s in this release.
New Enhancements
The Validity Check tool gets a rather useful enhancement. You can now check if Control Account/Work Packages Dates fall outside the project calendar. If you go to the Business Validations page of the Validity Check Wizard, you can see at the bottom of the screen a new check box.
If you select this check box, you can identify Control Account/Work Package start or finish dates (Baseline, Actual, Forecast, Early, Late, and Pending) that fall outside the project calendar dates.
This is a useful addition to the already invaluable Validity Check tool.
Bug Fixes
There are quite a few bug fixes that are addressed in Cumulative Update 12, and these include:
Explorer View
- Cobra took a long time to display the Explorer view data after you launched and logged into it.
File » Integration Wizard — Actual Costs
- When you ran the Integration wizard and loaded actual costs from a large import file which
created new resource assignment and cost records in Cobra, the integration was extremely slow.
File » Integration Wizard — Project Data
- When you ran the Integration wizard to load budget from Microsoft Project Server 2016 and assigned a value in the WBS field on the Schedule Mapping page, Cobra would encounter the “Illegal field length” error.
Project Processes » Calculate Earned Value
- When you ran the Calculate Progress against a work package with the Calculated Apportionment progress technique, the process would take longer than expected if the target work package was set to <Same as Source>\<WP>.
- When you ran the Calculate Progress against a work package with Calculated Apportionment progress technique, Cobra would not calculate the progress value correctly if the apportionment source was set to <All> and the target work package was set to <Same as Source>\<WP>.
Project Processes » Calculate Forecast
- When you ran the Calculate Forecast wizard against a forecast class that used a performance factor method where forecast was set at the work package level and the actuals were only entered at the control account level, Cobra would encounter the “[Error]: Unable to extract Actuals summary from detail files” error.
- When you ran the Calculate Forecast process on a project that contained actual costs at the control account level for a work package level actual costs class, Cobra would add orphaned resource assignments to the project.
Project View
- When you tried to filter a Control Account or Work Package Code field column in the Spreadsheet pane of the Project view and the Control Account or the Work Package Code field was not configured for the project, Cobra would encounter an unhandled exception error with the following message: “Selected field has no lookup value configured for it.”
- When you selected a work package with Assignment % Complete progress technique on the General tab of the Project view and clicked the Resource Assignments button, the budget resource assignments that were not included in the budget totals were displayed on the Resource Assignment Percent Complete dialog box.
- When you opened a project, Cobra took a long time to display the Project view.
Reports
- When you shared a personal report filter and clicked OK on the Edit Filter Expression dialog box, Cobra would not validate if there was an existing shared report filter with the same name and would allow you to save the changes.
- When you did not have any saved reports and you clicked the Personal Reports tab, Cobra would encounter the “Object reference not set to an instance of an object” unhandled exception error and replace all reports listed with large red X.
Summary
There are some nice improvements in the performance of Deltek Cobra as well as the rather useful enhancement to the Validity Check wizard. There are no changes to the underlying database and no data is changed by scripts while updating. I’ve upgraded my version of Cobra and everything is working fine here folks!