Notes on the Postpone facility

[claremacrae]

@ilandikov and I have been experimenting with the Postpone button's initial implementation.

Here is what we have come up with:

1 Current Behaviours

1.1 Date values

• Due:
  • if overdue, or due today, postpones to tomorrow
    • rejected - Change so that if overdue, it changes to today - otherwise, change to next day (as current behaviour)
    • It turns out that this is not the current behaviour for increments other than 1 day
  • if tomorrow or later, adds one day
• Scheduled:
  • if overdue, or due today, postpones to tomorrow
  • if tomorrow or later, adds one day
• Scheduled, due and starts:
  • Only edits due
• Scheduled and starts:
  • Only edits scheduled
• Starts:
  • Not edited - gives warning if it is the only date on the task
  • Treat Starts same as due and scheduled - see feat: Enable postponing of start dates #2454
• If no dates
  • 
  • Do not show 'Postpone' button if there are no postponable dates on the task
• If invalid dates - fixed in feat: hide postpone button if happens date absent or invalid #2485
  • Do not show 'Postpone' button if all the present happens dates are invalid - fixed in feat: hide postpone button if happens date absent or invalid #2485
  • Need to explore behaviour when some of the present happens dates are valid and some are not

1.2 Statuses

• Done tasks
  • It offers Postpone
  • Do not show button if DONE, CANCELLED or NON_TASK - fixed in feat: postponement usability improvements #2455

1.3 Rendering behaviour

• Short mode hides the word postpone
  • Remove word postpone - fixed in feat: postponement usability improvements #2455
• Tooltip
  • 
  • Make the tooltip describe the actual change - fixed in feat: Experimental changes to (unreleased) Postpone menu options #2497
  • How to get context menu to show on phones - iPhone? See 6a8eea7
• Right-click
  • 
  • Add more info to labels
    • Postpone Due date to yyyy-mm-dd (Wednesday)
• Move to after the Edit button - fixed in feat: postponement usability improvements #2455

2 Code/behaviour quality

• Tests
• Can it create fewer task objects - actually, this change was already included in the final PR
• Review the CSS names and uses - e.g. internal-button - done in e29dd19
• - rejected - TaskDate.ts - try not to import Notice - see buildAddStatusCollection() for ideas

3 Bugs

• Could not find the correct task line to update - fixed in fix: Postponing now works repeatedly #2486
  • 
  • Workaround is to edit another task in the file containing the problem task line, or to add or remove a line before any of the tasks in the file
  • Logged in Postponing of tasks only works once #2471
• Scheduled date inferred from filename
  • It says it has updated the scheduled date, but it does not
  • The code to look at is uses of DateFallback.ts

4 Documentation

• Figure out where to document the postpone facility - in Editing/
• Write user documentation for postpone - in 9a07044 and c5ca925.

4.1 Documentation topics

• Preference order:
  • Due date, if present, or
  • Scheduled date, if present, or
  • Start date, if present.
• No postpone button if:
  • No happens date
  • Any date being invalid
  • Task is done, cancelled or non-task
• Different date selection depending on if it's a future date (as opposed to current or overdue)
• New dates are shown in local language
• No calendar button yet, but one will be added at some point

5 Ideas for later improvement

• Add 'Today' and 'Tomorrow' menu items to content menu, where not already present.
• How to get Tooltips to show on phones - iPhone?
• On mobile, the tooltip should say ''press-and-hold for more options"
• Add calendar option to right-click
• Add right-click menu on each of the date emojis (including created and done) - to edit specific fields - logged in Add Postpone-like context menu to the Date Emojis (Start, Scheduled, Due and likely others too) to allow easy changing of individual fields #2648
• Better handling of tasks with no 'happens' dates
  • we could set Due date to 'TODAY'
  • Or say 'Right click for options' - and add a menu like:
    • Today
      • Due today
      • Scheduled today
      • Starts today
    • Tomorrow
      • Due Tomorrow
      • Scheduled Tomorrow
      • Starts Tomorrow

6 Ideas

• Logical order of task fields is:
  • Starts > Scheduled > Due
  • The last priority date will be edited
• Date order of tasks
  • Starts: 20 nov, Scheduled: 15 Nov, Due: 10 Nov
  • Last date: 20 Nov, so adjust

[ilandikov]

Suggestion for management of invalid happens dates:

• left click on postpone button does nothing
• right click/mouse over on postpone shows a warning saying which date is wrong
• right click/mouse over on an invalid date emoji shows a warning saying it is wrong
• left click on an invalid date emoji opens edit task modal with the invalid date selected (so that its modification may be done right away)

[claremacrae]

Moving my earlier reply up from below, to fix threading...

Suggestion for management of invalid happens dates:

• left click on postpone button does nothing

Since if there is no date to postpone, it pops up a message, I think it would be nice to be consistent, and let users know they have a problem date - which seems a more serious thing for them to be aware of than having no date...

• right click/mouse over on postpone shows a warning saying which date is wrong

Good idea.

• right click/mouse over on an invalid date emoji shows a warning saying it is wrong

Yes, though that would come under 'Ideas for later improvement'...

• left click on an invalid date emoji opens edit task modal with the invalid date selected (so that its modification may be done right away)

Not sure about that... as left-clicking on emoji currently does nothing...

[claremacrae]

Sample file for testing postponement - created whilst pairing with @ilandikov

Postpone - 2023-11-28.md

[claremacrae]

Note also these templates already in the Tasks-Demo vault, for quickly creating tasks with a useful range of date values:

[claremacrae]

I've logged the bug about 2nd and subsequent postponements of any task failing, and linked to it in the description above.

• Postponing of tasks only works once #2471

The logs pasted in that issue show why it is going wrong, but I have been unable to figure out how to fix it.

[claremacrae]

@ilandikov Hi, I've updated the description above with the latest state of play, and links to PRs.

[ilandikov]

1.1 Date values

• If invalid dates
  • Need to explore behaviour when some of the present happens dates are valid and some are not

For this point my proposal for logic is: postpone shall take into consideration the first non invalid date in the following order: due, scheduled, starts. Would you agree with that?

[claremacrae]

My proposal is that we don't make a proposal... 😄

Instead we experiment with writing tests to explore the various options for the new behaviour, and based upon what we learn, and how hard we think it might be to explain to users, we only then decide what the best way forward will be.

(One or two of our earlier decisions in this note have already turned out to be wrong, because we didn't think about the test cases/corner cases thoroughly....)

[claremacrae]

I've updated the description above to show the current status.

I'm about to release the Postpone button. I've moved several things to the section 5 Ideas for later improvement.

[chrabia]

Do I understand correctly that "if overdue, it changes to today" is not planned anymore? Instead "Today" is going to be added to context menu? Hmm, what's the reason behind that?

[JTJutajoh]

It will get done when I have time to do it.

I could work on Tasks 8 days a week and still not get done everything that is being requested. And as well as finding time to do things I wish to do on Tasks, I spend a lot of time here and on Discord answering questions from users - and I also spend a lot of time supporting other volunteers who are contributing to the plugin.

Thank you for your reply! My apologies if I came across as impatient, I am grateful for all of the volunteer work put into this amazing plugin and I appreciate the time and effort that it takes. I was just unsure if the "today" option was left out because it was assumed no one wanted it or if it simply wasn't ready, and wanted to weigh in just in case it was the former.

When I have found the time, I have been doing some refactoring of the Tasks code to introduce an abstraction for small task editing steps. And then introducing an abstraction for creating context menus that are populated with small editing steps.

Once that work is completed, it will be easy to add more context menus, and likely context menus with sub-menus.

I have not firmly decided how to use that to give control over which date field is postponed - but my current inclination is to allow right-clicking - or press-and-hold - on each of date date emojis - so any of the date values can be postponed - or brought forward - without needing to navigate through multiple layers of context menus.

This sounds great! Better than what I was even envisioning. If right-clicking on the date emojis is a possibility that would be a very elegant solution.
Again thank you for all of the work on this plugin. I use it extensively and it gets better with every update because of new features like postponement.

[chrabia]

The problem I found, especially when the date was hidden, was that when I clicked on the postpone button, when the task did not immediately disappear from the search results, it was impossible to distinguish between

Oh, I see. Well, everyone has a bit different setup of how he is using Tasks and have different problems. I didn't see the problem you mentioned, because I mostly use grouping by day. And if not, then I add the due date to be shown.

On the other hand I have similar problems like @JTJutajoh . I quite oftenly review the tasks next day in the morning. Or, sometimes, in the evening...but if it's past midnight, than I already have the problem with the tasks being postponed two days.

[claremacrae]

@chrabia @JTJutajoh

It [Today and Tomorrow] will get done when I have time to do it.

Well... This was an interesting exercise in "the Postpone menu code wasn't designed to allow new menu items that were "relative to today's date" rather than "relative to the field's current date".

Quite a fun refactoring exercise... I tried over several days, and last night I got it working on the 4th attempt.
I spent 12 hours in total.

I've just released it, in Tasks 5.6.0.

[cjncodes]

Thank you SOOOO much for this! It was the one piece of functionality I kept hoping for. Yay!!!

[chrabia]

woah, amazing, thank you very much for this, great job indeed!

[ilandikov]

@claremacrae I noticed in PostponeMenu.ts:

// TODO Call setChecked() to put a checkmark against the item, if it represents the current task field value.

Is this of any interest? I may have an implementation, but I have not found any feature requests related to this =)

[claremacrae]

@claremacrae I noticed in PostponeMenu.ts:

// TODO Call setChecked() to put a checkmark against the item, if it represents the current task field value.

Is this of any interest? I may have an implementation, but I have not found any feature requests related to this =)

Thanks for asking.

That's a surprisingly hard question to answer succinctly!

Firstly, there is this related issue... perhaps adding the checkmark would make it less likely for users to select the current date, but fixing the underlying problem (of disabling the Postpone button when it's selected, even if no edit is going to be made so the results are not redrawing thereby seemingly re-activating the Postpone button...) would be preferable...:

• Postpone today/tomorrow button becomes inactive after selecting the option for the current date value #2816

Secondly, the code in Postpone is really rather convoluted...

I tried refactoring it several times to re-use in the context menus on the date fields, and gave up.

I ended up creating these instead for the new context menus... They take care of adding the checkbox, and they do not make an edit to a task if no change would be made...:

• src/ui/EditInstructions/DateInstructions.ts
• src/ui/Menus/DateMenu.ts

The thing they don't do is pop up the Notice of the edit that has been made...

[ilandikov]

Firstly, there is this related issue... perhaps adding the checkmark would make it less likely for users to select the current date, but fixing the underlying problem (of disabling the Postpone button when it's selected, even if no edit is going to be made so the results are not redrawing thereby seemingly re-activating the Postpone button...) would be preferable...:

• Postpone today/tomorrow button becomes inactive after selecting the option for the current date value #2816

I think I have a solution for this one too =)

Secondly, the code in Postpone is really rather convoluted...

I tried refactoring it several times to re-use in the context menus on the date fields, and gave up.

The code is not easy to understand indeed, but I'm pretty sure I got it to work without much change =)

There is room for refactoring indeed, but that is probably better for pairing

[claremacrae]

Then yes, it's definitely of interest! 😄

[ilandikov]

Oki =) The PR with the checked item is submitted. I will have a separate one for the #2816, it uses some of the code from the current one.

As for refactoring I thought about moving all the functions to a class (Like Postponer), which would enclose all the data and behaviour related to postponing. But tbh for now the thing works quite well so I don't see any benefits in doing that except for code quality =)

[ilandikov]

@claremacrae I noticed in PostponeMenu.ts:

// TODO Call setChecked() to put a checkmark against the item, if it represents the current task field value.

Is this of any interest? I may have an implementation, but I have not found any feature requests related to this =)

Done in #3073