I want to add arbitrary information to a project, such as overall percentage complete, project value, quote id, invoiced etc.

I’m thinking of writing a greasemonkey script that injects a panel with these properties into the project page and stores it in another database linked with the project id, but was wondering if anyone else had done something similar already?

Thom,

I haven’t heard of anyone working on storing arbitrary properties in a separate database (linked via project id), but it’s not a bad idea.

A similar idea that has been tossed around quite a bit is encoding arbitrary properties (metadata) in Basecamp itself, via a special metadata syntax. The consensus of the developers at that time was to: use square brackets, separate keys and values with a colon, keys are case insensitive and whitespace doesn’t matter. So for instance, overall percentage would likely look like [Percent: 50] and invoiced might look like [INV]. The details for the metadata syntax are on the unofficial Basecamp API Wiki.

If you do end up using the metadata syntax, it would be helpful if you post the keys used and the formatting for the values on the API wiki, so other developers will know to use those same keys and value-formatting, so that the various BC widgets/apps are interoperable.

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