Question on Hierarchy & To-Do Filters
JL Fitzpatrick
pottster
JL Fitzpatrick
Dwight Arthur
Hi, John. I don’t understand your situation well enough to be able to help you with a solution but I can talk through MLO’s concept of filtered hierarchies and maybe it will help.
It appears to me that you want to apply a filter to your hierarchy and have it applied across all the levels of your hierarchy. Unfortunately it’s not that simple.
Hierarchical views are created in two steps (well, more really but only two that matter to this discussion) First, the main and advanced filters are applied to create a flat list of items that pass the filter at that level. The second step makes it hierarchical: the children and/or parents (per your request) are attached to each of the items that passed step one. The children and/or parents are filtered based *not* on the main and advanced filters but on the child filter and/or parent filter (click the “config” button after the Show Hierarchy filter). Then the resulting trees are merged and your view is ready.
I’m not sure if this is what you are after, but you could try turning Show Completed to Yes in the main filter and adding a child filter, Complete is False
None of this explains why you would get a nearly empty view when you set the main filter for Show Completed to No. We would have to dig further – if you don’t need to investigate this question that’s great, otherwise please let us know whether the project or any level parent of the missing tasks were completed. If not, to investigate this further I would ask you to post your profile file to the forum – if you do not want to publish the actual contents of your profile (I wouldn’t) maybe you could create a new blank profile, set up some dummy projects and tasks and reproduce the situation there, and then post it.
-Dwight
JL Fitzpatrick
- Show Actions: "All"
- Show Hierarchy "Yes" / Config Default on "Include Parent Items" and "Include Child Items" (I had not used this before because the "Config" text is not wrapped within the button and is illegible)
- Show Completed on "Yes"
- Advanced Filter default "DueDateTimeExists" for this view.
Dwight Arthur
Hi, John. Reading your description I now have a better understanding of what you are trying to do but no better understanding of why it does not work for you. My profile is fairly complex but it may have fewer levels that I’m guessing yours might have. ByDueDate has (as far as I can see) three changes from the Alltasks view (1) hierarchy is turned off, (2) Advanced filter selects items with due date (3) items are grouped by due date.
Remember that a hierarchical view presents a collection of one or more trees, where trees that overlap are merged. Main and advanced filters, sorts and grouping apply only to the top (root) level item in each tree. I believe that when you turn on the hierarchical view the default config is to show parents (with no parent filter) but not children. So the specification you have given asks for items that have a due date together with all parents of each, with the trees merged whenever they overlap, with the whole thing grouped by the due date of the item at the top of each tree.
First of all, I cannot imagine that grouping by the due date of the root is useful. I would suggest turning it off as it seems to make the result a little more confusing.
Second, remember that your view is made up of merged trees. Many of the items that qualify for inclusion are also parents of items that qualify for inclusion. Once the merging of trees is complete, those items are not shown because they passed the primary and advanced filters. Rather they are shown because they are parents of an included item, and passed the parent filter. When you throw out some of the bottom-level items because they are completed, that will also throw out any item that’s there only because it is somebody’s parent.
Consider this tree:
A D
/ \ / \
B C E F
If every one of these items is uncompleted and has a due date, your view will show all of them. If you complete B, C, and D they will drop from the listing but so will A. That’s because A was included as an item in its own right because it is uncompleted and has a due date, but also because it is a parent of B and also because it is a parent of C. In the merge, it survives as a parent. If B and C are then eliminated from the view because they are completed, A is eliminated because it has lost all of its children. D remains because it is the parent of uncompleted task F.
To get the view you want, I think you have to go at it from the other end. Instead of “show uncompleted tasks with due dates, and their parents” how about “show projects and all of their uncompleted children with due dates.”?
To do this, start with an unmodified All Tasks view. Set the general filters to Actions:all, Hierarchy: yes, completed: yes. Set the hierarchy config to: parents: clear. Child items: checked. Child filter: ((DueDateTime exists)AND(not(Complete))). I do not understand the Continue Searching item and it seems to make no difference in this case so ignore it. Back in the main screen, set advanced filter to (IsProject). Clear any groups and sorts.
Is the result what you want? If not, please be specific about what’s different from your expectation.
-Dwight
