Re: Is anyone using the Tasklist Module?

BraileTrail wrote:
> Tor,
> 
> In message <[email protected]>, Tor Norbye 
> <[email protected]> writes
> 
>>Yes, that might point to a problem. By the way - just to make doubly
>>sure - you're looking in the Suggestions View, not the User Task View,
>>for these "TODO" tasks to be listed, right? 
> 
> You hit the problem there! I was expecting the "tasks" to appear in the 
> User Task View, in mitigation I was led to this conclusion by the help 
> documentation as the following quote from "Tasks Embedded in the Source" 
> shows:
> 
> "The Editor Task List will recognize lines containing the above tokens, 
> and add tasks automatically to the editor task list. The set of 
> recognized tokens can be customized by the user. Go to the Options 
> dialog, and under Editing locate the Editor Task List sheet. It allows 
> you to customize the regular expression which is used to match tokens in 
> the source code."
> 
> Nothing in that quote suggests that it is added as a "suggestion" rather 
> than a "task".

Thanks for pointing that out - the documentation is a bit old. There
actually used to be a separate "Editor Task List" window. It was 
then generalized into the Suggestions feature you see today.

I know it's a bit akward that we separate out Suggestions from "User
Tasks". In a couple of other IDEs I've used they're treated as
the same thing. There are at least two reasons for this difference:
- We've taken the "user task" feature a bit further than other IDEs;
  the tasks are stored in standard iCalendar (.ics) format; we have
  a due date/alarm feature; user tasks have lots of attributes (such
  as time created, time last edited, etc.), and users should be able
  to view any of these attributes in the table itself - and sort by 
  these. (Make sure you've tried clicking the button right over the
  vertical scrollbar - it's also available from a context menu item
  but I can't remember the name ("List" something).
  If we try to blend a standard icalendar todo list with all kinds
  of dynamically source generated tasks (such as compiler errors)
  it gets questionable what we store on disk (we want to support
  storing these tasks on a server soon - there's an RFC for that
  but no widely available open source server yet), and it's also
  not clear which columns we should show by default in the 
  user task list. "Filename" and "Line Number" makes a lot of sense
  in the Suggestions view, but in the User task list they don't; 
  etc. etc.
- We don't have a good project manager in NetBeans (yet - 4.0), 
  so we can't really show "ALL" tasks the way other IDEs tend to.
  (We don't know where to restrict the search to since there's
  no specific list of files included in your project). Therefore
  the Suggestions View shows only the "current" tasks - e.g. those
  for the currently edited source file.  

I believe I filed a task a while ago to think more about how to
resolve this. If you, or anybody else (I've cc'ed dev@tasklist)
have any good ideas in this area speak up!

> I can happily report that it has been working all along and that after 
> reading the help for Suggestions it does say in there that these tasks 
> are shown as suggestions. I hadn't read it fully before because I 
> thought I was interested in tasks, not suggestions.

Glad to hear it's working, even if not intuitively!

-- Tor