Re: [Evolution-hackers] Thoughts on "Tasks"

[Federico Mena Quintero <federico ximian com>]

On Wed, 2003-08-13 at 12:46, Morten Skarsholm Risager wrote:

> *Have clickable URLs.

We support the URL property of iCalendar components, but RFC 2445 only
allows up to one such property per event/todo/etc.  We could also add
support for the ATTACH property, which points to a URI, and can be
included any number of times in an event.  For instance, you could have
a task with these properties:

	BEGIN:VTODO
	UID:2398465293476592
	SUMMARY:Submit abstract for GUADEC 2004
	DESCRIPTION:Sit down and write it, you lazy bum.
	URL:http://www.guadec.org             <--- "main" URL for task
	ATTACH:file:///home/federico/Documents/draft1.txt   <--- a file I'm using for this task
	ATTACH:file:///home/federico/Documents/crazy-idea.txt   <--- another file I'm using for this task
	END:VTODO

> *Make cross-references to my calendar. (A specific task appearing for a
> specified time in my calendar. By clicking it in the calendar I want to
> go to the tree I've made below this task in my outliner)

Cross-linking between Evolution's items could be done in the
calendar/tasks with ATTACH properties with a special
X-EVOLUTION-INTERNAL-REFERENCE parameter or something.  Evolution could
find the attachments with this special parameter and offer a way to go
to the relevant items in a way different than "show attachments".

> *A convenient way to "convert an email into a task" so that I can make
> notes below it.

Cross-linking should allow this.  In particular, the ALTREP parameter
for the DESCRIPTION property could be useful as well.  RFC 2445 suggests
a way in which you can have something like

	DESCRIPTION;ALTREP="evolution://Inbox/big-ugly-uid-here":The actual
	  description goes here.

This way you could link to a mail message from the description of a
task/event.

> *To be able to "associate" a number of people to a specific item in the
> tree. Maybe to remind me that I should ask these people about something.
> Maybe to assign the task to someone. Maybe to see if they are online and
> using IM.

Did we drop support for the CONTACT property at some point?

> *To be able to associate all kinds of documents/information to an item
> in the tree. A click should of course take me to the appropriate
> application.

See the ATTACH property above.

> I'm not really sure whether I am suggesting to upgrade the "Tasks"
> component to an advanced outliner or if I'm suggesting a separate
> application well-integrated with gnome. 

Finally, for your thoughts about hierarchical tasks, RFC 2445 has a
fantastically loosely-specified RELATED-TO property.  You use it to
define parent/child/sibling relationships between tasks/events.  Of
course the stupid RFC doesn't say what should happen if a bogus
iCalendar file has two events or tasks that are marked as being parents
of each other...

In any case, the tasks component could build a tree of tasks based on
the RELATED-TO properties.  We would have to see if the other iCalendar
RFCs specify semantics for e.g. what happens when you have a parent task
with several uncompleted children, and you mark the parent as complete
--- should you mark the children as complete as well, or just assume
that the parent's setting overrides that of the children?

The problem with doing all of the above is that it takes a lot of user
interface code to handle all the myriad fields that iCalendar supports. 
Windows like the event/task editors get cluttered, etc.

  Federico