ThinkingRock Forum

I was looking at the exported/subscribed information in the ICS file, and one thing I noticed is that there is no easy way to see what Project a To Do item is connected with.

For instance, I might have a Next Action item "Plan Project".... and it's for my "Find Best Car" sub-project of my "Buy a New Car" project.

However, the only information I have is "Plan Project" in my To Do list (or if it was scheduled, on my Event Calendar).

A good field for this might be Location.... while on first thought, exporting Context to this field makes more sense (since my Location is basically a context), in looking at how programs like iCAL, Sunbird, and Korganizer all treat these fields, Location is generally chooseable in the field column list and is sortable... other fields, like Attendee, URL, etc. are not.... and Project is probably something that needs to be sortable.

Perhaps putting "Project Name:Sub-Project Name1:Sub-Project Name2" etc. in the Location field would address this? (I don't think the colon separator motif breaks anything in iCAL formats.... tried it in iCal and Sunbird and didn't see any problems).

When you create a project for a thought (in Process Thoughts), the first ASAP action created automatically in v1.2.1 was 'Plan and organise this project'. As I had a similar problem to yours when I was testing the actions reports (which don't include the project name), TR v1.2.2 appends the thought description at the end: 'Plan and organise this project <thought>'.

What do you think?

I will suggest to Jeremy to use the location for the context.

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Claire
ThinkingRock Analyst and Tester

I am currently looking at this and think that it would be best to do the following:

Put the context into the iCal Location field
Put the project/thought description within square or curly brackets (eg [My project] {My thought}) in the iCal comments field.

Please let me know what you think.

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ThinkingRock Developer

I looked at a few test cases, and there's one other option you might consider.... how about putting it into the Category field?

There are pluses and minuses to both:

For Category:

- It's easy to sort... I can see all my events/todos by Category inside iCal or Sunbird etc. All of the Calendars I'm familiar with allow you to do this (Korganizer, etc..... even Outlook, if you import an ICS into it).

- It "makes sense"

- It could be done as a hierarchy, like "Buy a Car:Identify Car:Car Shopping Trip"..... only problem with this is that there is probably a limit to how long this text field can be, so you'd have to trim in, and you might loose SOME useful text.

For Comments:

- After testing it, I realized that you see the Comment, BUT NOT THE CATEGORY (!) when you hover over an Event in most Calendar programs. Sooo... just browsing a calendar actually probably is easier if you put the project in Comment.

- No trimming needed.... as you said, just put the Project Hierarchy in Square Brackets at the beginning of the comment, and append the existing comment... so you'd see "[Buy a Car:Identify Car:Car Shopping Trip] and then some notes blah blah blah". That actually looks pretty good from the few test cases I put together.

After writing this, I'm thinking I like putting it in Comments too - the ability to sort it probably isn't that valuable

As a follow-up to this, perhaps consider putting the Topic into Category? That might also make sense, in that Topics are short-names, like Category, and that fits the "sense" of Category as well....

I can't find any way to display the Location or Category fields in iCal.
Am I right in thinking that you can't?

If this is the case we need to put any extra info into the comments field for iCal at least.

I guess we could have user preferences for which fields to include and where to put them.

Yes, that's right.... iCal doesn't display the location or category fields It was one of the reasons I switched form iCal to Sunbird on OSX (Korganizer under Linux DOES display them).

Certainly, if it's doable, giving the user the choice of which fields (even if its just ambiguous ones like these) map to which fields in the target export format (in this case, ics files) would be really cool

If not, then putting the project heirarchy in Comments sounds good, and then use the Topics field to hold Category (which won't help iCal users, but will be fine for everyone else).

Just a side note: putting Category fields in the ics file doesn't seem to cause any problems for iCal... it just ignores them. Probably the same for Location too So there would be no harm in just doing those two for Sunbird and Korganizer and anything else that reads those files and has exposed UI for the fields.... iCal users just wouldn't see them.