[peterk]

I need a way - presumably, ideally, a perspective - to find all those actions for which I have been lazy enough not to set a due date. Any ideas?
Thanks
Peter

[whpalmer4]

Context mode, group by due date, close all the groups except the one for No Due Date. A warning: if the parent of an action has a due date, the child is treated as having the parent's due date if it doesn't have its own (or it is later than the parent's).

[whpalmer4]

A bit of advice: try to avoid putting due dates on everything. It is generally best to only put due dates on actions where it really has to be done by the due date. Putting due dates on as a way to encourage you to work on this or that tends to diminish the effectiveness of the warnings.

whpalmer4's advice seems good to me - parsimony is probably a virtue in the use of dates.

If, on the other hand, you do need a clean checklist of tasks which have no due date (uncomplicated by any inheritance from enclosing action groups) you can use a saved search like:

tasks where due date is missing value

in Where in OF.

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[whpalmer4]

Ah, I wasn't sure if the lack of an explicitly set due date was detectable, and didn't have time to do the relevant experiment. Good to know! But that causes me to wonder: is there any way to get Where in OF to find all the items with a due date in a range, including the actions where the due date is inherited? Or do I have to use the standard OmniFocus tools for that?

That is a very good question, and does reveal a blind spot in the current range of Applescript task properties.
At the moment, you can begin, in Applescript or Where in OF, with something like:

tasks where its due date < soon or (its parent task is not missing value and due date of its parent task < soon)

However, a task may, of course, be nested to an arbitrary depth within enclosing action groups, so this kind of query soon grows to be unwieldy, and there is, in any case, no way of directly detecting just how deeply nested a task is.

The cache does, however, track the timestamp value effectiveDateDue so it might be worth putting in a request for this to be exposed by a new Applescript property effective due date (analogous to effectively hidden which was very helpfully added this summer).

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Originally Posted by whpalmer4

is there any way to get Where in OF to find all the items with a due date in a range, including the actions where the due date is inherited?

Given that OF currently displays all matches in Project View, and (following a date-range search) will place the selection highlight on the relevant parental/ancestral action group of any task that is inheriting an effective due date, does the gap feel like a practical obstacle ?

If it does, one solution might be to re-work Where in OF so that, while the Applescript library lacks an effective due date property, Where In OF directly queries the cache for that information.

(i.e. adding a preprocessor that converts the existing AS-type queries to SQL queries, and allows for the addition of some custom properties)

(possibly verging on the baroque again here :-)

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A PS:

There are two analogous gaps in the Applescript library:

The cache has TASK.effectiveFlagged and TASK.effectiveDateToStart

but in the absence of effectively flagged and effective start date properties, we only have applescript filters like:

flattened tasks where start date is missing value

and

flattened tasks where flagged is false

which (probably unexpectedly) include tasks which are shown by the OF GUI as effectively inheriting flagged status and/or start date.

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[whpalmer4]

Originally Posted by RobTrew

Given that OF currently displays all matches in Project View, and (following a date-range search) will place the selection highlight on the relevant parental/ancestral action group of any task that is inheriting an effective due date, does the gap feel like a practical obstacle ?

No, not as much when considering the display behavior. I was thinking about one of the advantages of Where in OF (the ability to search in an arbitrary date range), and without consideration of the display behavior it did seem like a blind spot, but the display behavior narrows it a bit. The only exception that comes to mind is if you wanted to select all matching actions (and nothing else) for copying and pasting into some other application, cleaning up the selection could be tedious...

(possibly verging on the baroque again here :-)

As long as there is good counterpoint... :-)

Originally Posted by whpalmer4

The only exception that comes to mind is if you wanted to select all matching actions (and nothing else) for copying and pasting into some other application, cleaning up the selection could be tedious...

That's a good point.

I'll give it some thought. A simple first step might just be to quietly make Where in OF bilingual (unofficially accepting SQL queries as well as those in an Applescript idiom).

(Which reminds me of a story about Andrei Gromyko - but that's probably a little off-topic).