OF3: Perspective project filter not acting as expected..?

OmniFocus OmniFocus for iOS
#1

I’m using an upgraded Perspective (OF3 Pro) with the filter ‘Has an active project which has available actions’.
That filter, by name, indicates (to me?) it should show Actions from Projects that have available Actions i.e. not ‘on hold’, blocked by other actions etc. The same as setting the view filter to ‘Available’. However, in my experience, it’s behaving more like: ‘Has an active project which has remaining actions’, or setting the view filter to ‘Remaining’.

Can anyone confirm that is the case for them? – I’m trying to work out if I’ve identified a bug or if I’m simply using it wrong.

More context: What am I trying to do?
Ever since OF1, I have wanted a perspective that would show all “On hold” actions that are the next action for a project. Why? A lot of the professional [OF] projects I create follow a structure similar to:

  1. discuss feature/requirement with management
  2. plan and/or design feature
  3. write up the brief in company ticketing system
  4. assign brief to the developer
  5. waiting for the developer to submit for code review
  6. review and feedback to the developer
  7. merge & publish work
  8. Tell management it’s done

I use automation to create this kinda structure and fill in details of the project, quickly

The situation with this set up in OF, is my “Waiting for” perspective displays point 5 (from the example above) even before I’ve completed point 1. I never want that. I don’t want to be reminded I’m waiting for something before I’m actually waiting for it.

Today, when I’m processing my ‘Waiting for’ context I have to cross reference my projects to check if I’m actually waiting for it! This is time-consuming, but not doing it has, embarrassingly, caused me to chase something before I’ve even handed it over ☺️ – FYI I have an absolutely abysmal memory (it would shock you!), hence I use OF to track all the things.

Upon getting my hands on OF3 🤯 I had thought this situation was solved for me! Now I’m not so sure… HELP!

Cheers

#2

The ‘has an active project which has available actions’ is just selecting all available actions that belong to an active project. Not quite what you’re looking for.

You might consider using a tag to help you, though. You could add a blocked tag until those waiting for actions are really being waited for, then exclude items with blocked from your waiting perspective.

Perhaps not as elegant, but might help.

#3

That’s a very interesting use case, worth the attention of @SupportHumans for sure.

Besides emailing it in with your support (and feature) request, you may want to consider turning your Waiting tag/context into an active tag, instead of an on-hold one. I know it may sound silly as you do not want your Waiting tasks elsewhere, but with new perspectives you can easily filter them out on all your other perspectives, while having your Waiting for perspective set to show only available tasks tagged Waiting – they would only show up when they should, I guess… no?

How do you like that?

#4

Does something like the following get closer to what you’re hoping for?

Has an active project which has available actions
None of the following
    Availability:Available
    Availablity:Completed

In other words, all the items from projects with available actions, but with the completed and available ones filtered out.

(We filed a feature request around the overall use case so we can think of other rules that might help, as well.)

1 Like
#5

Sorry, I accidentally gave that perspective rule the wrong name when I created it. It actually corresponds to the old v2 perspectives setting “Filter Projects: Active” and it simply returns all projects that are active (no matter what actions might or might not exist within that project). The proper name for that rule should be “Has an active project”. (We’ll fix it!)

2 Likes
#6

I think there might be an open request for this actual condition, too 😉

ScottyJ