Question

I use TWiki to record a list of the tasks I have completed during any given day. If I'm unable to finish something by the end of the day, I add it to a second list on the same topic page, so that I can keep a list of the tasks that were incomplete for each day, as well as the ones that I did complete.

This leads me to a problem where, if I want to know which tasks I still need to finish, I have to open multiple topic pages and check them all.

What I would like to be abke to do is have a single page that returns a list of all the items in the second ('unfinished') task list from all of the individual day pages.

I imagine that if this is possible, I would need to tag/flag/identify the list on each page somehow, but is it actually possible ?

From what I've read so far about the search command, it looks like it can only return topic names, and not matching content from within a topic.

The alternative is that I put any unfinished tasks into a single common page manually, but I'ld prefer to keep everything that relates to a given day in the same place, if possible.

Environment

-- IanBatterbee - 23 Aug 2006

Answer

If you answer a question - or someone answered one of your questions - please remember to edit the page and set the status to answered. The status selector is below the edit box.

One option would be to surround the section on each day page that lists the unfinished tasks, with something like <!--Start--> and <!--End-->. Then you can do a formatted search using $pattern(.*<!--Start-->(.*?)<!--End-->.*) That would return everything between those two markers.

-- MatthewCardozo - 23 Aug 2006

Another more complex solution would be to make each task a topic of it's own. Have a TWikiForm attached to each task that holds the status. Then for each day, have a search that returns all the unfinished tasks. Lots and lots of options if you go this route.

-- MatthewCardozo - 23 Aug 2006

Thanks. I considered the second option before posting and thought it would make things too difficult.. usually I'm adding less than a line of text, and I thought the overhead of dealing with a topic save delay for every line I typed would be too frustrating and slow.

I'll have a look at the first idea though - that looks like it may have potential.

Thanks

-- IanBatterbee - 27 Aug 2006

The second option seems to work best for me. I've found an issue with the results returned though - I wanted to display a link to the topic that each result came from, but not all of my work logs contain unfinished items. This means that if I format the output with $topic, I get the topic name for every matching topic, and not just the ones that had content that matched the regexp.

What I need is a conditional structure... something along the lines of the spreadsheet @IF(condition, truevalue, falsevalue), but as a twiki variable.

Such a variable/function doesn't seem to currently exist in TwikiVariables - or am I looking in the wrong place ?

Scrub that.. was looking at old documentation.. http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/TWiki/TWikiVariables#IF_condition_simple_conditionals is what I want.

-- IanBatterbee - 27 Aug 2006

answering own question..

-- IanBatterbee - 27 Aug 2006

Then again.. I can only check the entire result of the search, and not each matching item within the search results, so.. that doesn't actually help me.

I don't suppose there's a way to iterate through a list of results from a search and conditionally display each one ?

-- IanBatterbee - 27 Aug 2006

I have done a conditional display of search results using a SpreadSheetPlugin CALC. Example SEARCH format:

format="$percntCALC{$IF($EXACT(<something>, <something else>), <nop>, | $topic | $summary |)}$percnt"

On partial include: You can use named sections (%STARTSECTION{"name"}% ... %ENDSECTION{"name"}%), and include just a named section.

-- PeterThoeny - 29 Aug 2006

Thanks. I'll have a look at those ideas.

-- IanBatterbee - 30 Aug 2006

So which structure did you decide to go with IanBatterbee? If you went with the second, separate topic for each task, you should be able to display just the unfinished tasks. If you went the first route, you should have control over what goes between the tags that are being included.

-- MatthewCardozo - 31 Aug 2006