[twilhite]

When I sync to iCal, my tasks, for example @@Calls Foobar have double @@ signs. Why?

[Brian]

Hmmm... that's not something I remember seeing before, but I'm happy to help try and sort this out. To that end, can you provide a bit more detail on what you're seeing?

I'm guessing that you have "include each action's context in it's calendar item title" enabled in OmniFocus' iCal preferences. Normally, though, that setting takes the form of "Task Name [context name]" when exported.

If I'm reading your question correctly, you see the context name in front of the task name. I'm not sure why that's happening.

It may help if you can attach some before/after screenshots to the thread so we can see exactly what you're seeing.

The following would be helpful:
screenshot of an action in OmniFocus
one of the same action when synced to iCal.
one of the iCal pane of OmniFocus' preferences

Finally, can you look in the General pane of preferences and let me know if the "Show full hierarchy, using separator" box has been checked, and if so, what's entered in the text field to the right?

[twilhite]

Brian:

I have attached the screenshots. I did not have the option Show Full Hierarchy checked. I do now with the ":" as the separator. Odd behavior.

[Brian]

Okay, I spent some time in our test lab and figured out what's going on here...

It turns out that the "include context" setting will automatically put an @ symbol at the start of the context. Presumably, this is meant to help differentiate the context from the action name, since iCal doesn't have a separate Context field for us to use.

In your case, since the context names actually start with an @, you end up with two of 'em when you export to iCal. I'm honestly a little surprised this wasn't uncovered/reported before, so thanks for letting us know about this!

I'll file a request against the iCal sync process. In theory, OmniFocus could check for context names like yours and not add the @ sign during export if one was there already.

In the meantime, though, the double @ signs may be unavoidable in iCal, unless the contexts are renamed in OmniFocus.

For what it's worth, I started off with my contexts named that way, but eventually removed the @ characters. Since OmniFocus has dedicated fields for action titles, project names, and contexts I found that I didn't need the extra character to remind me what was a context and what wasn't.