Discussion: Merging Tasklists

[.dan.g.]

Hi All

The request for an 'offline' mode for 'Simple Source Control' which would allow changes to be merged into a shared tasklist at a later time/date comes up fairly often.

The principle or merging is not hard and has already been solved for the archiving functionality.

However there are two non-trivial issues to which we must find an answer:

1. Two users 'simultaneously' create a new task which gets the same ID assigned to it

This can be solved by comparing creation dates. Different dates = different tasks

2. Two users 'simultaneously' edit the same task

This is harder to solve for two reasons:

 

a) Tasks do not have per attribute modification dates

b) Task modification dates are specified in local time

At present the archiving simply won't overwrite the attributes if the source task is older.

ie. Whoever modifies last wins. 

All comments welcome.

ps. If I saved a copy of the tasklist before the 'offline' user modified it then I could perform a 3-way merge which would probably solve things

 

 

 

 

[Alex]

Hopefully I'm not necroposting)
So this is the case:
when 2 users create, say, 1 task each, they mostly will recognize who's the task creator. However the 3rd user (and forth) won't. Users have to be distinguished between each other, 'log in' under their credentials.
While creation of login system seems to me complicated and unnecessary I propose a) 'obligatory' assignment in settings 'Created By' to a specific user (I think it's already available by default) b) usage of 'Created By' column in a shared tasklist. In merging combination of both values (creation date and allocated by) will define the task ID.
Clear user allocation gives more postprocessing opportunities (however this feature is already available).
A notification to fill in 'Created by' in the settings before saving can be helpful if the field is empty.

[Giamma Theo]

I think that a total offline mode would be difficult to achieve. Two user could completely modify the same or more tasks, then it is harder to say what should be the final word. A merge could be nice, although the end result could be confusing.

Maybe a step ahead towards parallel working on a list (that is not a total offline mode) would be to give the possibility to the users to lock a single task (instead of the entire tasklist) so that multiple user can work concurrently on different tasks of the same tasklist, and this would then require a method to "merge" the concurrent works...

[.dan.g.]

Locking single tasks should be appearing in 7.3...

[Giamma Theo]

Great!

Maybe it is a redundant suggestion, but if possibile I hope in a new "padlock" column where each task has its own dual-state check-out flag

Regards

Gian