Multi-tagging of activities

[privong]

I'm interested in the possibility of tasks being assigned multiple tags, or perhaps more specifically to be associated with a project and also tagging. Let's say my morning looks something like this:

• (meeting) project-1: widget-1 design
• (meeting) project-2: database upgrade
• (coding) project-2: database upgrade

I'd like to be able to generate reports that tell me:

1. project-based summaries: how much time was spent on project-1, project-2, etc
2. "action"-based summaries: how much time was spent in meetings, coding, etc.

I know it's possible to enter tasks into utt to satisfy either goal (1) (prefixing with project-1, project-2) or (2) (prefixing with email, coding, etc.), but not both simultaneously.

I think enabling both types of reporting would require defining an additional mark-up convention. Quickly brainstorming, some possibilities are:

1. utt add "project-1,meeting: widget-1 design" (project name required to be first in the list or everything becomes a tag and the user must sort it out later?)
2. utt add "project-1: widget-1 design [meeting]" (secondary tag in brackets at the end)
3. utt add "project-1[meeting]: widget-1 design"

I opened the issue to get some feedback on:

1. the general concept and whether others would find this useful
2. whether this is something best added into utt itself, or as a separate plugin. In the latter case, something like syntax brainstorm (2) is probably desirable, as it wouldn't affect utt usage without the plugin.

The addition of "action" tagging (not the ideal name, but I don't want to confuse with "Activities" as used in the utt docs) could affect the "Activities" section of the report, and it's not immediately obvious how to handle this. In generating a report on the activities described at the top, would "(meeting) project-2: database upgrade" and "(coding) project-2: database upgrade" be summed in the "Activities" section of the report as "project-2: database upgrade" or would they be listed separately? It's not immediately obvious to me which way this should go.

[larose]

Thanks @privong, let me think about it and I'll get back to you soon.

[privong]

I had missed the -c COMMENT option to utt add; I don't think I can directly use this to address my need, but it might also be possible to incorporate this additional layer of tagging into the Activity comment(s).

[larose]

Hi @privong, I can see that a labels/tags feature can be useful to some people. However, I'm not sure how popular it would be and how it should be reported in the report view. So I propose that you start with a plugin, then you test it for a little while (and maybe by others too), and then we add it to utt if it's a success (with a config flag that allows to enable/disable it).

Note that I've just merged a PR that allows overriding the report view from a plugin. So you can create your plugin by using utt's public api. You can see an example here how I overrode the report view in the tests: https://github.com/larose/utt/blob/master/test/integration/utt_example_plugin/utt/plugins/report_view.py

As for the syntax, I prefer:

$ utt add "project-1: widget-1 design [meeting]"

Unfortunately, the plugin system doesn't currently allow this kind of changes to utt, but what you can do, in the meantime, is to add the labels/tags as a comment. Example:

$ utt add "project-1: widget-1 design" -c "[meeting]"

Then, your plugin will be able to parse the comment of each activity.

I think the plugin should output a new section between the projects and activities sections.

Please let me know what you think.

[privong]

@larose Sounds good. Thanks for looking at this and giving it some thought. I agree that the bracketed tagging syntax seems like the better option. Thanks for pointing me to the report-override plugin example.

I'll poke at this and will do a PR once I have something worth looking at. I'm not sure what that timeline will be though. I'll keep this issue open, in case you or others want to chime in with more thoughts.

[larose]

I'll close this issue, but feel free to reopen it if there is any progress.