I have a “Today by project” perspective that is defined as:
Remaining AND (Inbox OR Due Soon OR (Available AND Tagged “Today”))
The first screen below shows a group tagged “Today” containing two Actions that are not tagged “Today” in the built-in Projects perspective.
The second screen shows how this is rendered in my Today by projects perspective. It shows only Action 3, not the group action (without it’s subsections) even though the group action is Available AND Tagged “Today”.
Is this a bug or are group actions somehow not actions? They surely look like actions to me…
I have an assumption. What are your Structure settings? They are displayed on the first custom perspective screen that you can see before you open the rules.
It seems to me that for the filter rules the action group called „Group“ is not Available, due to its contained actions (which miss the focus tag criteria).
If you change the last rules from:
All of the following:
Availability: Available
Tagged with any of: …
To:
All of the following:
Availability: Remaining
Tagged with any of: …
I would assume OmniGroup would call the action group kind of blocked due to the two actions within it.
If you go to OF Settings → Appearance and turn on option „Color Text for First Available Actions“ then you‘ll see the action group changes its color when the two embedded actions are completed or dropped.
Because of this, I think that‘s intentional behaviour.
I‘m not quite sure what you intend to achieve, but the following rule extension (the last All of the following…) would display the action group as well:
Yes, that seems like a “bug” to me. A group action looks like a standard action except it has sub-actions. If I check it off as done, it itself as well as all sub-actions are checked off. If I flag it, all sub-actions are marked as inheriting-the-flag. It can have its own tags (tags are not inherited). So it quacks like an action, walks like an action and looks like an action. Yet the filter does not regard it as an action?
I think one could very much argue that that is a bug.
Yes except seeing Available actions only is the point here.
Interesting! I have that typically turned off since OF4. This seems to suggest that OF treats the group action as the “last” action, which can only be tackled once , like when a project can be set to automatically complete upon the completion of its last action.
Anyway, I think that’s confused. The group action clearly doesn’t behave as the “last action after all subsections are complete”. In addition, many if not most use cases consist of main task plus subtasks, not last task plus subtasks.
That’s a crazy workaround. NOT(NOT a project or group)) AND tagged with X is not just bonkers logic but also indicates that the semantics of the logic above is confused, too, because groups are perfectly included IF their sub-actions somehow match as well.
The Action Group has the following description in the OF4 Glossary:
A collection of child actions nested underneath a parent action, and which must all be completed before the parent action can be completed.
With this, the an action group (the parent) is still active, but not available before its children are dropped or completed.
The rule to display the action group respects this by intentionally excluding actions. The rule may be confusing and there are clearer options in OF4.2. Because, I don‘t know if you use the OF4.2 TestFlight or not I stuck to OF4 behaviour. None (not one) of the following and then the Is not a project or group just states Is a project or group.
It seems difficult to grasp and there may be ways to have a simpler concept, but it is as it is.
The part in bold says precisely what I am saying. You can’t complete a group action without completing the sub-actions. What this part does not say, however, is that you can’t start the group action before you start any of the sub-actions. That would be absurd and out of touch with how the world works. Yes, I can’t complete a report before finance gives me a key number but I sure as hell can start working on it before I get that number!
Here is a visual explanation for why OF is confused. Most of the time, we have a parent task A with some subtasks, e.g. S1 and S2. I can start anywhere but the whole is not completed until everything is done (left side). What OF tries to have us do is declaring anything that can be done before the subtasks as extra subtasks R, which are then followed by the actual subtasks S (potentially interspersed with more R subtasks), then followed by at least one final subtask T, or, if we don’t want to do that, A serves that purpose as well. And, the whole thing is also A. It is bonkers.
