[curt.clifton]

Chris,

Your suggestion is interesting. It prompts several questions for me.

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.)

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. If the promotion is actually a change to the stored data, how does one review completed projects? They would be collapsed into a single level of single actions with all dependency information lost. And what happens with repeating projects where the dependency information has to be recovered?

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.

I don't mean to suggest that the current design is ideal, but a simple represention of dependencies that supports all the other features we want is a very difficult design problem.