I am not very clear about how exactly recurring tasks work.



I understand that these are the repeating tasks and we can schedule for any dates and frewquency we want. but how about their predecessors, successors or resources. can we assign different activties as predecessors or successors to these. or when i created a few recurring tasks for example, they were created on teh dates and frequency i specificed without even giving predecessors or successors. how do these recurring tasks relate to the rest of activities...

Project will not automatically insert predecessors or successors to your tasks. Recurring tasks are most frequently used for status meetings or other events that occur on a set schedule.

so yes my question is, when we insert task like that, would it be included in the schedule calculation? for instance it has a path on its own so is it like another separate branch? assuming we do not insert predecessor and successoor but it still has tasks that go on at the same time with other activities

Yes, the task is included in schedule calculation but recurring tasks are constrained with SNET constraints. You certainly may add predecessors and successors but assuming the tasks are shorter than the total duration, they will not increase overall project duration. If you assign resources, those assignments will be included in total work, total cost, and also used for resource overallocation.

so first of all. when we say recurring task, we talk about all individual tasks together that make up that recurring task? for instance lets say i have a recurring task that will start today and will be every monday, for 1 day, till the end of this year.

do we think of these tasks as an inseparable, inbreakble block? for example when we assign a predecessor do we only assign to the first one and then no need to do the rest? or can we assign a predecessor to a task in the middle? but if we do that then the recurring task will not occur as we tell the program. that is what confuses me.

or if we can insert predecessor to any element of the recurring task, and say for one of them its predecessor is delayed, then what is more important - the delay of that predecessor or the set dates and frequency that we had set for the recurring task? if latter is the case, then assigning predecessor has no meaning

Recurring tasks are grouped together under a summary task, so each of the occurrences of your Monday tasks would appear grouped underneath that summary.

When you define the recurring task, you set the range of recurrence from Start to Finish and each occurrence will be constrained with a Start No Earlier Than constraint. If a single occurrence has a predecessor it will obey the predecessor and the constraint - however - no other occurrences will be rescheduled.

I suggest creating some recurring tasks to better understand how they function.