Filter conditions problem with included contexts

[Radek Pilich]

I might be hungry or not thinking..... 

I cannot figure out how to set up filter conditions so that it includes tasks that have both parent context and included child context assigned AND at the same time doesn't include tasks, that have only the included child context assigned, without having the parent context assigned.

No matter what I try, I always get all the tasks, I cannot exclude those that have only the included child context.

Please help.

[John Hughes]

Hello,

I don’t know the answer because I have never fully understood the functionality of context.

If you step back and try to imagine: what if you were using flags or text tags, then maybe they would work in a more straightforward way.

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[A. W.]

Hm. i think that making a step back and defining precisely what - not how - needs to be the outcome could be a reasonable next step.

Currently i do not get - on the what level - what the plan to achieve is.

If you want to discuss ;) - pick a time. sometimes explaining to somebody else solves the issue ;).

https://calendly.com/deugister/one-on-one-with-me 

[Stéph]

Likewise, I'm struggling to understand that complex set of criteria. Are you trying to find the tasks where their parent's context is missing? If so, I can't find a way to do that precisely. However, you might want to test from be parent's perspective by using "HasSubTasks" and "Contexts... is empty" in your filter.

[Radek Pilich]

Simple - let's say I have parent context "time of day" that includes morning, afternoon, evening contexts.

I want to list tasks, that have both time of day + morning assigned while also excluding tasks that have morning assigned but don't have time of day assigned.

How do I do that?

[Stéph]

Ah, my apologies - I thought you were talking about the context of parent and child tasks, having forgotten that you can have 'parent contexts' which include one or more 'child contexts'. I'd even forgotten that the option to include contexts within other contexts exists. 

Unfortunately, as soon as something is assigned the context "morning", it will be automatically considered to be included in the context "time of day", because you've defined "time of day" to include "morning". Contexts can be included within other contexts, but it's not the same as the hierarchy of parent and child tasks. 

This possibly makes your context assignment easier, though: You don't have to assign "time of day" directly to anything - all of the items with "morning", "afternoon" or "evening" would be visible in any filtered view using the context "time of day".

[A. W.]

what sense that has content wise i am not sure.

however technically you can create an advanced filter - see picture.

This filter does what you want - if i understood your ask. Is  basically the translation of your sentence into a formula in MLO - advanced filter.

Of course this filter must not conflict with any other standard filter which is active.

It becomes tricky if you want to use this logic to filter within the hierachy, which is possible too.

MLO is quite powerfull in filtering...

[Stéph]

I should have thought of that. Nice one, A.W.!

Like you say, I can't understand the point in this particular case, because you only need to assign the specific time of day contexts for an overall "time of day" filter to work. Maybe Radek's workflow involves assigning "time of day" to identify those items which will need to be assigned to a specific time of day, before he comes back and defines which time of day each one needs to be assigned to? If so, then maybe he needs to see which items he's flagged as needing a time of day, but which haven't yet been assigned to a specific time of day.

Maybe I'm over-thinking this, though! :-D

[Radek Pilich]

What A.W. is showing on the screenshot doesn't obviously work, that's why I was asking :)

I understand that it's not clear why I use contexts in this seemingly odd way, so let me briefly tell you.

The reasons for having time of day parent context with morning, noon, afternoon, evening, night children contexts are follows:

• the contexts are set in a way, that all the children contexts have restricted open hours and the parent is opened all day
• this allows to set all kinds of filters
  • in advanced filtering, I can simply use the parent time of day context with consider open hours option, so that the views only show tasks opened during the current part of the day
  • or I don't have to restrict it in views setup and only add filtering in ad-hoc workspace filters. either for current time (via parent) or for specific time of the day (i.e. a view that always shows morning tasks)
  • it also frees additional filtering and / or enables combination of filtering with multiple contexts, that wouldn't otherwise be possible
• my context system is still developing and is still somehow overblown, so I might procrastinate with settings contexts for new task. To work around that, I have the parent time of day context set as a context to be inherited to all subtasks from the top level folders, therefore the newly created tasks show in the filtered lists as soon as possible..... and restricting the task to a given children timeslot is an optional next step...
  
• ...so as a part of my workflow, it's my responsibility to remove the general technical time of day parent context and change it to some children context such as evening
• however sometimes, I obviously mess up and leave the parent context assigned as well, therefore making the child context open hours restriction not work as intended (the tasks shows up during all day even though I want it to show only during evening)
• therefore.... the filter I wanted to set up is a kind of a "maintenance / administration" filter, that will list the tasks that have unintentionally / accidentally assigned both the parent and child contexts, so that I can remove the parent one from all of the tasks in the list
• the problem is, that no matter what I tried, the lists also shows the tasks that are already processed correctly to the point of having only the child context and having parent context already removed.... 
• ... which makes the maintenance of such context assignments impossible

[A. W.]

Did you already look into the child filtering of the hierachy?

Sound like a combination of the main filter to find the "main entrypoints" and then work from there with the child filtering.