[emacs-wiki-discuss] Re: Suggestions for using Planner to manage teams? (Re: Hopefully minor enhancements to PlannerMode)

[amidon]

Hi Everyone,

I'm the person that sent Sacha the two suggestions she forwarded to
the list earlier today.  

{-- Wed, 05 Jan 2005 22:59:57 +0900: Sacha <sacha at free.net.ph> wrote: --}
  Sacha> I have some ideas on how to do what you have in mind, but
  Sacha> might not have time until this weekend. A number of people on
  Sacha> the mailing list use planner not just for their personal
  Sacha> tasks but also for other people's data and they might be able
  Sacha> to share some workarounds with you. For example, John
  Sacha> Sullivan regularly exports task data from his planner file
  Sacha> for his boss, who doesn't use Planner. (John: I don't suppose
  Sacha> we could get him to use it? <impish grin>) Andrew J. Korty
  Sacha> has code for fine-grained access control.

I would be very interested in feedback on how others use Planner to
keep track of team activities.  

In response to my suggestion that planner-copy-or-move-region keep
tasks under the same outline headings and subheadings if they exist on
both pages involved to get around tasks get jumbled, Sacha suggested:

  Sacha> A quick workaround for your first suggestion might be a
  Sacha> custom sorting function that sorts by status and then by task
  Sacha> description, or vice versa. That'll give you some kind of
  Sacha> order while we figure out how to carry forward tasks
  Sacha> organized in an outline. (Good support for hierarchical tasks
  Sacha> will make other people happy, too.)

I don't think this will really be much better than the existing
sorting.  I would still have to manually go through and sort them out
each morning.  There is actually a side benefit to having to do so, in
that it forces me to review the tasks a bit...  :-)

That being said, I would really like to find a way to move tasks
between pages maintaining their place in a shared outline structure.

In response to my suggestion to have a way to completely hide the
completed tasks on a plan page, Sacha suggested:

  Sacha> Ahhh, this isn't an overlay thing, because invisible text is
  Sacha> still there (although hidden).

  Sacha> This sounds like something grep can do:

  Sacha>     grep -e '^#[ABC][0-9]* \+[^XC]' *

  Sacha> You can use grep to filter the list according to team members
  Sacha> as well.

When I saw this, all I could say was "Doh!"  I needed to do a bit more
"out of the box" thinking.  Grep wasn't quite up to what I wanted, but
gawk was.  If anyone is interested, here is what I am using right now:

---  cut here ----
#!/usr/bin/awk -f

BEGIN {
  in_tasks = 0;
}

/^\#[A-C] +[_o>CD] +/ {
  if (in_tasks) {
    $0 = gensub(/\[\[([^\]]*)\]\[([^\]]*)\]\]/, "\\2", "g");
    $0 = gensub(/\([A-Za-z0-9-_./]*\)$/, "", "g");
    print;
  }
}

/^\* Tasks/ {
  in_tasks = 1;
  print;
}

/^\* / && ! /^* Tasks/ {
  in_tasks = 0;
}

/^\*\*+ / {
  print;
}
---  cut here ----

This extracts just the tasks section, replaces the emacs-wiki links
with just the titles, and eliminate the page references at the end.  I
like it.  At least, it does the job I want.  

      -- Keith