Baselines

A baseline is a frozen snapshot of your project’s schedule at a point in time. Capture one when you commit a plan to stakeholders, then compare it against the live schedule to see exactly how far — and which tasks — have drifted.

Capture & management are API-only today

The baseline data model and endpoints are fully available, but capturing, activating, and deleting baselines is currently done through the REST API — there is no in-app “Capture baseline” button yet. Once an active baseline exists, TruePPM shows a read-only baseline-vs-current comparison in the task detail drawer (see Comparing against the plan). A capture/manage UI and structured rebaseline reasons are planned for 0.5.

What a baseline captures

Capturing a baseline records, for every task in the project at that moment:

• the task name (kept even if the task is later deleted),
• planned start and finish dates,
• duration, and any actual start/finish already recorded.

Snapshots are immutable — once written, a baseline’s task rows never change, so a baseline remains a faithful record of what the plan looked like when you took it. A baseline notes whether its tasks had computed CPM dates at capture time, so a comparison can flag a snapshot that was taken before the schedule was fully calculated.

Multiple baselines

A project can hold many baselines — for example one per phase gate — but one is active at a time. The active baseline is the one used for comparison. Activating a different baseline automatically deactivates the previous one.

Capturing and managing baselines via the API

All endpoints are project-scoped and authenticated with a bearer token ($JWT); $PROJECT_ID is the project UUID.

# 1. Capture a baseline (name optional — auto-named "Baseline N" if omitted).
#    Requires the Project Manager role. Snapshots every task atomically.
curl -X POST -H "Authorization: Bearer $JWT" -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"name": "Phase 1 commit"}' \
  https://trueppm.example.com/api/v1/projects/$PROJECT_ID/baselines/

# 2. List baselines for the project.
curl -H "Authorization: Bearer $JWT" \
  https://trueppm.example.com/api/v1/projects/$PROJECT_ID/baselines/

# 3. Activate a baseline (deactivates any other). Requires the Project Manager role.
curl -X POST -H "Authorization: Bearer $JWT" \
  https://trueppm.example.com/api/v1/projects/$PROJECT_ID/baselines/$BASELINE_ID/activate/

# 4. Delete a baseline. Requires the Project Admin (owner) role.
curl -X DELETE -H "Authorization: Bearer $JWT" \
  https://trueppm.example.com/api/v1/projects/$PROJECT_ID/baselines/$BASELINE_ID/

Method & path	Purpose	Permission
GET /api/v1/projects/{id}/baselines/	List baselines	Project member
POST /api/v1/projects/{id}/baselines/	Capture a baseline (auto-named if blank)	Project Manager (ADMIN)
GET /api/v1/projects/{id}/baselines/{baselineId}/	Retrieve (with task count)	Project member
POST /api/v1/projects/{id}/baselines/{baselineId}/activate/	Make active, deactivate others	Project Manager (ADMIN)
DELETE /api/v1/projects/{id}/baselines/{baselineId}/	Delete a baseline	Project Admin (OWNER)

Comparing against the plan

Once a baseline is active, opening a task in the Schedule view shows a Baseline section in the task detail drawer with the planned-vs-current comparison for that task:

Planned (baseline)	Current (live)	Delta
Start / finish at capture	Start / finish from the latest CPM run	Variance in days (e.g. +3 days)

The same per-task comparison is available directly from the API:

# Active baseline vs current schedule for a single task.
curl -H "Authorization: Bearer $JWT" \
  https://trueppm.example.com/api/v1/projects/$PROJECT_ID/tasks/$TASK_ID/baseline/

The response is discriminated by has_baseline / in_baseline: it reports no baseline, a task added after the baseline was taken, or a full comparison row with start_delta_days / finish_delta_days (positive = slipping later than planned).