Single action lists as "bins"
 

When I first set up my OmniFocus workflow, I decided to use single action lists as "bins" to categorize my projects and actions according to areas of responsibility. (I chose to use SALs instead of folders mostly for convenience - when creating a new action, it's easy to file it in the right SAL from the keyboard. With folders, you have to drag the action to the destination folder.)

Mostly, this strategy has worked well. But lately, I've noticed that even if I set my SALs not to be marked as completed when the last action is done, they get marked this way anyway without any input on my part. I keep unchecking the box "Mark complete when completing last item" but it keeps getting re-checked when I look a day or two later.

I'm wondering if this is expected behavior or a bug. If the former, I will have to re-think my strategy and convert all my SAL bins to folders, which would take a lot of time.

Thanks.

PS: I will email support about this as well.

That's not supposed to happen. I think I've suggested this before, that you could put a dummy action in your single action lists with a future start date (so it doesn't appear during your normal operations) which would presumably keep the list from ever going empty of uncompleted actions to lessen the annoyance while the bug is hunted down and fixed.

I have dozens of SAL containers, but they almost never completely empty out, so I haven't experienced this bug first-hand.

Thanks for confirming that this is a bug. I was beginning to question myself. I'm still not sure what conditions are resetting the "mark complete" checkbox, though. I don't know that emptying out an SAL does it - I just tried completing the only remaining task in one and it didn't reset.

OK... I've just confirmed that the mark complete checkbox for all my SALs goes from unchecked to checked each time I update to the latest sneaky peek. I'll email support.

To quote that pointy-eared chap: "fascinating" :-)

I just installed the latest sneaky peek after examining that checkbox for all 40 of my SALs. Count of SALs with checkbox set

before update: 0
after update: 0

How do you have the preference set for auto-completion ("When completing the last item: [] Mark the project or group complete") at the bottom of the Data preferences pane?

I just discovered that if I switch back and forth between OmniFocus 1.6.1 and a more recent version, that checkbox gets enabled on a SAL if and only if I had the default set to auto-completion.

I had the pref set to auto-complete. It's still a bug, but at least I now know how to prevent it. I'm glad that I won't have to change all my SALs into folders, though truth be told I'd use folders if there were a quick way to get actions into them from the keyboard. Thanks.

[QUOTE=r48;84232]I had the pref set to auto-complete. It's still a bug, but at least I now know how to prevent it. I'm glad that I won't have to change all my SALs into folders, though truth be told I'd use folders if there were a quick way to get actions into them from the keyboard. Thanks.[/QUOTE]

There's no way to put actions directly into folders. Only projects can be put in folders. SALs are the only mechanism for tasks that aren't part of a larger project.

If you don't mind a bit of extra machinery hanging around, you [b]can[/b] put individual actions in folders — they look just like projects with no actions :-) You want to use a 1.8 sneaky peek (or later) if you want them to show up in context lists, however.