[nicholas_j]

ok - I guess your proposal would work. It is however, the opposite of the way I want to approach it and I'll explain why. Under your proposal I would have to remember that in some projects I would need to activate a special perspective in order view "completed" items (which are complete in one sense, but which I need to review later). In some cases (like my insurance example above) - a list may appear complete even though there are a few hidden items - and I could easily forget to activate the special perspective.

I suppose that in my insurance example I could just duplicate my list - one list for the act of collecting these items on my computer, and an identical list for mailing these items off.

I prefer the idea of having a "clean this project" button because different projects have different rhythms. My inbox gets swept 4-5 times a day (well actually not because I'm so afraid it's going to make some important piece of information disappear elsewhere in my projects). Mini projects might get swept every day and complicated projects once a week or less (in my ideal world).

[nicholas_j]

Is it possible to make a "clean current project" function with applescript? I have no idea how applescript works.

[Brian]

I believe you can activate "Clean Up" from an applescript, but it's just going to do what pressing the button would do.

[whpalmer4]

Originally Posted by nicholas_j

Is it possible to make a "clean current project" function with applescript? I have no idea how applescript works.

No, as Ken mentioned earlier, cleanup actually happens as soon as the item is marked complete, but a given view already in place will continue to show the checked off item until the view needs to be recomputed (changing from Available to Remaining actions, for example). The Applescript verb that implements the clean up function works on everything in the document.

The way you want to use the program is not very robust. If you have to restart for some reason, or even just accidentally close the wrong window, your "footprints" will vanish. Also, if you are viewing Remaining projects instead of All projects, and have a project set to auto-complete, the "footprints" for that project will vanish immediately upon checking off the last item, as the project will no longer match the sidebar filter.

[whpalmer4]

Originally Posted by nicholas_j

ok - I guess your proposal would work. It is however, the opposite of the way I want to approach it and I'll explain why. Under your proposal I would have to remember that in some projects I would need to activate a special perspective in order view "completed" items (which are complete in one sense, but which I need to review later). In some cases (like my insurance example above) - a list may appear complete even though there are a few hidden items - and I could easily forget to activate the special perspective.

I take it your list is going to appear complete "even though there are a few hidden items" because you are trying to use 1 checkbox to track 2 different things: 1) I collected this item, and 2) I put this item in the envelope. As Brian suggests, duplicating the collection list and running it again for the processing step is a more reliable approach. However, if you have your heart set on using the list only once, you could rework your project and actions slightly so that you only need to use it once. Make the action group where you collect all the documents also be where you assemble the claim. Instead of an action like "Get copy of police report" you would have "Get copy of police report and put in claim envelope" and now you've got everything in the envelope once you've ticked off all the actions.

I prefer the idea of having a "clean this project" button because different projects have different rhythms. My inbox gets swept 4-5 times a day (well actually not because I'm so afraid it's going to make some important piece of information disappear elsewhere in my projects). Mini projects might get swept every day and complicated projects once a week or less (in my ideal world).

You're worrying up above about forgetting to use the proper view when reviewing for completeness, but down here you think nothing of remembering to clean up individual projects at a range of different intervals? What's wrong with this picture? :-)

Am I correct in thinking that you want items to persist in the checked-off-but-not-hidden state indefinitely, until you clean them up, even across application restarts? That would be the logical extension of this, I think. How do you propose to handle the case where you have a project view and a context view that overlap, and you do a cleanup in the context view? And what if you duplicate a window that has some checked off items, do you expect the new window should also show them as checked off but not cleaned up? There currently is no database state kept to indicate whether an action is in the checked off but not cleaned up state, only whether or not it is checked off. The individual window knows that it you haven't cleaned it up, but that state isn't preserved once the window goes away. It would be a fairly extensive bit of work to track this additional state, and yet in the end, it's hard to point at what all that work makes possible that you can't already do in Project view showing all actions and a Completion Date column. Definitely send in your feature request with Help->Send Feedback, but you might have a really long wait before there are enough votes to bubble it up anywhere near the top of the pile.