Comments on: Recurring tasks

By: Jon Gabrielson

Jon Gabrielson — Wed, 01 Oct 2003 14:25:55 +0000

For anyone wanting a quick fix, here is what I have running in a daily cronjob.
It works for weekly,daily,and monthly if
the prefix of the task starts with
Sun-,DAILY-,3rd- respectively. Also note,
that using this, the only way to permanently remove the task is to change the title first.

update tasks.tasks set obsolete=0,status=0,parent=0 where substring_index(title,’-',1) = date_format(now(),’%D’) or substring_index(title,’-',1) = ‘DAILY’ or substring_index(title,’-',1) = date_format(now(),’%a’);

By: Alex King

Alex King — Wed, 01 Oct 2003 01:51:50 +0000

The percentages can’t be marginalized in a heirarchical system because the recurring tasks can occur in a tree along with non-recurring tasks.

Personally, I’d want to be able to modify each occurance so that will definitely be a factor as I build it.

By: Jon Gabrielson

Jon Gabrielson — Wed, 01 Oct 2003 01:28:30 +0000

I think that percentages are usually not applicable for recurring tasks.
For instance, if you have 2 subtasks and one of them is daily, after 100 days, the percent done will always be 99%
For that same reason, I think that having
a new task each time is also a bad idea because the database will get large quickly. I think the best solution is to have a single task, that if marked daily, reappears each day, and people can use the ‘insert date/time’ button to update the task and then just delete/markcomplete as usual.
The the next day/week/etc.., the deleted task would “undelete” itself with comments intack.

By: Alex King

Alex King — Fri, 19 Sep 2003 20:36:13 +0000

Yes, I agree I’ll need to set some limit. There are probably a lot of things I need to account for that I haven’t fully thought through yet.

By: rands

rands — Thu, 18 Sep 2003 22:17:04 +0000

Yeah, it’s a ton of work to calculate recurrences. Especially if you start to give options to OCCUR EVERY FRIDAY or EVERY OTHER WEEK or NEVER ON HOLIDAYS.

Still, you’re going to need to artificially limit recurrences via your App by not allow ongoing recurrences, right? There will be a limit to the # of recurrences that can be created.

By: Alex King

Alex King — Thu, 18 Sep 2003 20:57:54 +0000

The problem is the heirarchy. I agree that it bloats the database, but without keeping a task for each occurance, calculating the completion of the parent tasks and allowing people to make changes to individual occurances of recurring tasks would be very difficult. This leads me to think that a record for each occurance is the right way to go.

By: rands

rands — Thu, 18 Sep 2003 19:49:12 +0000

I haven’t had a new for recurring tasks yet as I’ve still just in my primal phase of using tasks, but I wanted to comment on recurring tasks.

If I understand your proposal then you’re going to create a seperate task for instance of of the recurrence? What about if I say “Give me a status report reminder even Friday until the end of time?” Mucho database spam.

What I’ve done in the past (for non-web-based applications) is to create a separate kind of virtual recurring task which exists more of as a policy (status task, every friday, end of time) rather than a specific task.

Making any sense here?