OF Context Mode Sort By Project
 

I made a perspective that lists all active contexts. It's ungrouped and sorted by project. It displays all remaining tasks.

So at least in theory, all of the tasks for each project are listed one project at a time like this (where the order of tasks 1, 2, and 3 tracks the order of these tasks in the project view).

Task 1 Project 1
Task 2 Project 1
Task 3 Project 1
Task 1 Project 2
Task 2 Project 2
Task 3 Project 2

But instead of the order above, I getting something that looks more like this:

Task 2 Project 1
Task 1 Project 1
Task 3 Project 1
Task 3 Project 2
Task 1 Project 2
Task 2 Project 2

So within tasks in a particular project, the sub-sort order seems kind of random? Or am I missing something?

If you have nested tasks in your project view, does this affect the sort order?

For example, in a lot of projects, I have a Task header called "Phase 1: Admin."

Nested under that header, I might have a few more tasks, so it looks like this:

Phase 1: Admin
Task 1
Task 2

Ideally in the context view of my perspective, it would be great if things also sorted like the example directly above. But instead, I get stuff like this:

Task 1
Task 2
Phase 1: Admin

Curious if anyone has any thoughts on this. Is there anything I can do about this? Or is this just a bug/feature of OF?

KS

In context mode, tasks inside projects and action groups appear in "reverse Polish" order :-) If you've ever had an HP calculator, or programmed a stack-based machine, it is immediately obvious what's going on.

The container follows the contained items. The reason for this is to allow you to work through a project or action group, and when you've completed all the actions, the container itself then becomes available to be checked off as complete, or be a visual cue that you need to add some more actions, if appropriate.

If your project looked like
[code]
Task 1
Task 2
Task 3
Task 4
Task 5
Task 6
Task 7
[/code]
the context mode list would look like
Task 2
Task 1 (in bold)
Task 4
Task 6
Task 7
Task 5 (in bold)
Task 3 (in bold)
MyProject (in bold)

Does this explain what you are seeing?

whpalmer4, thanks for explaining why we are seeing this seemingly strange behaviour.

The next question is: why anyone would think this is a natural and/or useful way of displaying this information? The fact that your example uses a hierarchical presentation to illustrate the project structure kind of speaks for itself.

Not everyone using OF is a computer scientist who would understand RPN! (I am by the way). At a minimum this should be made configurable. Oh well.

Actually, the reason for doing this is quite simple: that's the order in which you would check off the items as you complete them! You do task 2, then you check off its parent. On to task 3, which requires you to do task 4, task 5, and then you check off task 3 as complete, but before you can mark task 5 complete, you've got to go do tasks 6 and 7. If you are viewing your tasks grouped and sorted by project, you just go straight down the list.

I agree. It's too bad there are more configuration options. But I did find an option in the preferences to turn off displaying projects and action lists in contexts mode. This at least solved part of the problem.

This isn't a huge problem for me in OF itself. But I'm now exporting a list of task to todo.txt for use on my android phone, and getting the tasks in this order makes it more confusing to use the output in todo.txt.

That being said, your explanation is helpful to me. That definitely does make a certain sort of logical sense. I guess for me, I'm so used to seeing things in hierarchical outline form that even if I might be checking off the project name last, it still easier and more logical for me to see that information first as a header.

KS