Quote:
Originally Posted by curt.clifton
Currently the outline in OF indicates containment: a folder contains a number of projects and other folders; a project contains actions; and action groups contain substeps. Your suggestion is to make the hierarchy within projects indicate dependencies. So, "parent-of" is equal to "prerequisite". Do I assume correctly that you would still consider projects and folders to indicate containment? That seems like an abrupt discontinuity in the design. (Perhaps even more abrupt than that between projects and action groups currently.)
|
Yes, hierarchy would denote containment for projects/folders and dependency for actions. That's because projects and folders are by definition containers (of actions and projects respectively), but actions are not containers. I can see how there is potential user confusion, but for myself, I find the current "Action Group" paradigm extremely confusing and not useful.
Of course, how the two different hierarchies are displayed to the user is a separate matter. Right now, OF uses the same visual cues for both hierarchies. That's not necessarily the only way to do things, of course. I haven't thought about that, though.
Quote:
|
Also, currently the full containment hierarchy of a project is maintained even as I check off actions. That is, if I filter for All Actions, I can see the original hierarchy. With your proposal for promoting the children, would that hierarchy be maintained? That is, do you see the promotion to just be a rendering issue or is it actually a change to the data structure? If it is really just a rendering issue, what happens when I decide I need to add a new prerequisite to an action? Now the data structure needs to reflect multiple parents for a single action.
|
I hadn't thought of this, but it seems clear that it's just rendering. I don't see the problem you are thinking about in your last two sentences. My structure doesn't allow for multiple parents, so that's something you could never do. (Current structure doesn't allow that either, I don't think.)
Quote:
|
Finally, Suppose I have a sequential project with 20 steps. (This isn't hypothetical; my daily course prep is approximately that.) In your proposal that would be 20 outline levels deep.
|
Yes, that might be a problem if the interface for the action hierarchy used indentation. But, it would only be a problem in some views (All, Remaining, maybe Completed). Second, I wonder if your actions are truly sequential, or if you have just chosen them to be so (due perhaps to current OF limitations?). Is your prep list similar to my example above? I'd be curious what the 20 sequential step prepartion really is, and if there aren't some parallel steps in it.