Adding To-Do List

[03nix]

maltehi,
I've tried using evrenvarol's fix to add the To-Do List items to include any flagged emails. I haven't been able to have success adding his code to yours. Could you see what my problem is and potentially add this feature to the taskboard?

everenvarol's fix:
evrenvarol@011f814
evrenvarol@a3da5be

My attempt:
app To-Do Items fix attempt.txt

Thanks!

[maltehi]

Fixed that with the newest commit. Flagged mails can't be moved across lanes yet, though. This would require assigning them a status somehow... Maybe later.

[03nix]

Thanks Malte for all the work on this! I didn't think it would be as complex as this.

I attempted to implement your changes, but now my Backlog column is blank now. I removed the journal entries in outlook, so they could be regenerated, but still continued blank. I also set /"INCLUDE_TODOS": true,/ and still was nothing showed up. I tested it on the Next column and it worked on that column, just not the Backlog column. I'm using Outlook 2016 if that makes any difference.

Thanks,
Dave

[maltehi]

Hi Dave,

the blank Backlog lane might be due to the default statuses I set in one of the recent commits:

I modified the taskboard so it can handle all tasks being in the default folder, i.e. no custom folders configured. The sorting into lanes is done only by the task status in that case, which also can be set in the edit view of the Oulook tasks. To enable this, I assigned the default status "Deferred" to the Backlog lane, as it was still free and I thought it was a good match. If all your Backlog tasks have the status "Not started yet", which is the default, they will not be displayed. You can change the lane status back to "Not started yet" (0) in the config, though.

I also changed the getOutlookFolder function again, so it ignores the folder settings when working with the To Do list, as the To Do list does not have subfolders (but hopefully includes tasks from all folders by default). This might also help if you had custom folders set on other lanes.

Cheers,
Malte

[03nix]

Thanks for the input Malte! I changed this in the config and was able to restore functionality for the Backlog lane:
"DEFERRED": {
"VALUE": 0,
"TEXT": "Not Started"
}

[03nix]

Malte,
Thanks for the changes that you had made and the amount of work you've already put into this. As I was working on the newest version you deployed, I had a couple questions.

I'm finding that all flagged emails show up in the Backlog lane including the ones that have been marked as completed. How can I apply a filter that would only show emails that were flagged, but not in a completed status?

Like you had mentioned previously, dragging emails to other lanes does not work correctly. In the previous version by Evren, a flagged email that was dragged to another lane was converted into a task. Is that something that could be brought back until a better solution for handling emails is developed?

Thanks again for all the development time you've put into this. I hope these two changes aren't too complicated to develop.

Dave

[maltehi]

Hi Dave,

can you reference the version where this automatic conversion into a task object is included in evrenvarol's taskboard? I couldn't find it in the most recent one.

Anyway, you can always manually convert emails into tasks by dragging them into any task folder in Outlook's folder view. This will also make them show up in the task board, of course.

When I have some time, I will see how I can integrate this a bit better into the taskboard, but I'm not sure yet how to do the conversion exactly between tasks and mails.

Malte

[Smittyman]

Malte,

I would definitely be interested in seeing the project support flagged emails in some fashion. If there were some way to keep the flagged emails in their current state with the ability to display the due date associated with the flag on a card that could move between lanes that would be great. I'm speaking strictly from a workflow perspective, but you can use quick steps in outlook to flag an email and drop it in another folder rather than having to move it to a task folder and fill out all the other fields. I do utilize tasks that are pulled in from OneNote as well though, so having my flagged emails and tasks in the same Kanban board would be a huge step up in visualization of all my work. Anyway, thanks for all the hard work on the project fork and I look forward to seeing it continue to evolve. Thanks.

Mike

[03nix]

Hey Malte,
Sorry for not getting back to you sooner. I was using the last version of evrenvarol's taskboard. From my testing with this version of taskboard, I found that when I move the email from the Backlog lane to the Next lane, it automatically converts it into a task and actually places the email in the deleted items. The task is still kept and placed in the Next lane. Hope that helps some.

Thanks,
Dave

[NewMC]

A note regarding dragging of emails to the Outlook Tasks folder: My experience is that I typically lose all formatting with this method. Any embedded images, tables or attachments are not transferred to the new task that gets created, and text formatting gets changed.

A good alternative, at least for work emails that may contain more than simple text, is to create a new Quick Step that uses the "Create a task with attachment" action. This will place the original email with all attachments and formatting in a new task, as an attachment.

[Runecreed]

This feature would be great as the Kanban board really should have drag functionality as well as showing all outstanding tasks in the backlog. As it stands without showing all tasks (the Tasks folder is really just a subset of all tasks if you use other folders to organize via project for example) its a bit incomplete.

I'm quite busy with work these days so probably won't be able to chime in for the near future- this is very promising stuff though and would love to see the project continued.

I think it has a very promising workflow should the board view allow for flagged emails + other subfolders to be scanned and added to the backlog lane -- I imagine dragging an email from one lane to another would be doable by creating a task out of it with attachment of the original, and unflagging the original; that would clear it from the backlog lane with appropriate task delegated to another one, perhaps.

Thanks for the hard work, I'm really happy to have found this project!

[maphew]

Can anyone provide a concrete example of how ToDo items can be made to show up? I tried adding INCLUDE_TODOS as per the below but there is noticeable change.

 "BACKLOG_FOLDER": {
    "ACTIVE": true,
    "INCLUDE_TODOS": true,
    "NAME": "",
    "TITLE": "BACKLOG",
    "SORT": "-priority,duedate,categoryNames,subject",
    "RESTRICT": "",
    "DISPLAY_PROPERTIES": {
      "OWNER": false,
      "PERCENT": false,
      "TOTALWORK": false
    },
    "FILTER_ON_START_DATE": false,
    "REPORT": {
      "DISPLAY": true
    }
  }

I'm using commit 63c5376 (HEAD -> master, origin/master, origin/HEAD).

[maphew]

Ok, I figured out my mistake and learned a couple things:

• the INCLUDE_TODOS setting isn't per container of Backlog, Next, ... , but a single global setting. It is found near the bottom of the config file, around line 95.

• The next line "INCLUDE_TODOS_STATUS": 0,: the number corresponds to the items in the "STATUS" json block. Out of the box this means the Backlog lane is empty, and Next is where all the ToDo's show up. To put the ToDo's in Backlog lane use status of 4 (gleaned from @03nix and @maltehi above).

• to make editing the config less error prone use Notepad++ with the JSON Viewer plugin, and test in something like https://jsonlint.com/ if you can't find any errors being complained about.

Here's my working config: https://gist.github.com/maphew/2ab0f4d0c7fa2d0ab86e8fa997308071