Use filename as date fallback

[jloh]

First off thankyou so much for creating Obsidian Tasks! I've been through every task tracker under the sun over the years and I think I've finally found one I'll manage to actually stick with.

I create a "dashboard" of sorts with all my tasks using a Dataview JS query like this:

const {DateTime} = luxon
const today = DateTime.now().toFormat('yyyy-MM-dd')
const tomorrow = DateTime.now().plus({days: 1}).toFormat('yyyy-MM-dd')
const query = `
not done
(((happens before ${tomorrow}) AND (happens after ${today})) OR (filename includes ${today}.md))
hide due date
short mode
`;

dv.paragraph('```tasks\n' + query + '\n```');

This works great since I store tasks in a few different files but also heavily use periodic notes to store ad-hoc tasks as my day goes on. My periodic notes are created in the format YYYY-MM-DD.md in a folder like Daily Notes/YYYY/MM. Pretty standard.

This setup lets me show current daily tasks from outside the daily note in my "dashboard" as due today which is perfect.

The issue I run into is creating tasks in future daily notes. I have a separate Dataview query that shows overdue tasks like this:

const {DateTime} = luxon
const today = DateTime.now().toFormat('yyyy-MM-dd')
const query = `
not done
(happens before ${today}) OR ((filename does not include ${today}.md) AND (path includes Daily Notes))
hide due date
short mode
`;

dv.paragraph('```tasks\n' + query + '\n```');

This makes tasks outside of my daily notes that have a schedule/due date show up and also tasks inside previous daily notes. If I create a task in a future daily note however it also appears here since it isn't in todays note.

It would be awesome if I could tell Obsidian Tasks to try using the current files filename as the fallback for a date of the task or if its easier some frontmatter that I could easily put in using periodic notes. This would let me create future periodic notes and not have its tasks show up in the overdue view. Apologies if this is currently possible, I've searched through all the settings and can't find anything appropriate!

Completely understand this is a bit of a unique usecase and if it isn't possible I can just schedule my future tasks outside of periodic notes and set a date against them (I do this currently).

[claremacrae]

Hi @jloh, many thanks for this.

I could have sworn that this had been requested previously, but have hunted high and low in Issues and Discussions and cannot find it right now.

It isn't possible, and it is a popular request. Having it logged here is helpful. Thank you.

First off thankyou so much for creating Obsidian Tasks! I've been through every task tracker under the sun over the years and I think I've finally found one I'll manage to actually stick with.

Thank you! I took over maintaining and developing it a few months ago. @schemar gets all the credit for creating and popularising it!

[schemar]

I completely understand what you want to do @jloh and why you want to do it.

All we can offer for now is a workaround (if you are willing to shift your mental model of tasks and daily notes and their relation):
If you have an ephemeral, quick, easy, or in any other way "context-less" task, I would create it in today's note and set the desired due date.
It shouldn't show up in the query results for today, since it is due another day. It will, however, show correctly on the due date's day.
The "context" now is the day it was created, maybe even surrounded by a few notes of what happened before and after the task was created.

Hope this helps.

If it helps, I can give you a brief insight into the design of Tasks:
Tasks' design is set up so that the task should live in the context where it was created. This way, at least in theory, you have the benefit of going back into the context in case you need to understand the task better or where it came from. This design completely neglects daily notes, unfortunately. In practice there are often smaller tasks that just pop up throughout the day and don't require (or even have) any additional context. If you are a user of daily notes, ideally you would want to add it to the daily note of the day it is due. As stated, that's unfortunately not possible. To get the most out of the Tasks plugin, it helps if you shift your mental model of Tasks away from daily notes.

As a side note, slated existed before Tasks and was focusing entirely on putting tasks into daily notes. The author has since moved on to create tq (though it looks like that has been archived as well).

A benefit of Tasks (at least implementation wise) is that you can re-schedule the task without moving it to another daily note.

Also, @claremacrae put so much work into this plugin that it is no longer true that I should get the credit.

[jloh]

Thankyou both for your replies!

@schemar I hadn't considered the context around tasks that this plugin provides and I really like the idea of creating future tasks against the current daily note to facilitate that. I think I'm going to give it a go and see how it feels, it'll likely be much nicer than having sporadic future daily notes hanging around for week or months at a time 😄 I had looked at slated and tq earlier today but felt tasks was more for me. Thankyou for linking them all the same.

@claremacrae best of luck maintaining the plugin. Whilst you didn't say I completely understand how unrewarding OS work can be at times, I hope you understand how much I appreciate your work! I can't write JS to save my life but if there is any way I can help out I'd love to be involved.

[claremacrae]

Wow. Thank you @jloh for such a kind message: it really means a lot to me - much appreciated!

[claremacrae]

... I can't write JS to save my life but if there is any way I can help out I'd love to be involved.

Hi James, does your kind offer include testing new features?

If so, and if you have time, I would really appreciate any testing or feedback on #1241 (feat: Add 'explain' instruction, to visualise tasks block filters).

There's info, and a link to test it out, in the ticket....
No pressure!

[jloh]

I'll do my best to get testing done this weekend 🙏

[claremacrae]

See also this comment: #130 (comment)

@mvdkwast wrote:

I wrote some code as a POC to do just this, and it seems to make my life (a little) easier, since it dispenses me from having to manually add a date to each daily task, and also revealed some forgotten tasks added to dailies a while ago.

I would be really interested in seeing this code!

Cleaning this up to merge it into obsidian-tasks is not entirely trivial, since it raises questions about user configuration. Currently I expect a daily note to be always named daily/yyyy-mm-dd, but this may not always be the case. I used the scheduled date, but this may suit everyone's need. Should the daily notes plugin be auto-detected, etc... Also this feature should probably be optional.

Interesting questions.

As another possible scenario, 'if a task is in any file with a date in the name, and the task does not have its own due, scheduled or start date, then use the date from the file name as the due date, to save me having a due date to add to ever task'. In this scenario, it doesn't matter whether the file is a daily note or not.

[claremacrae]

And also - from #130 (reply in thread)

I do think that having an option to treat the date in the file name as a due date, or perhaps some other field, would be welcomed by many.

Personally, I create several files a week with actions for a particular event on that day (caring for a relative). There are often 30 to 40 tasks on that day, in that same file, and adding a due date to all of them gets very old really quickly.

So in my case, it's less about where the note goes, as how to remove the need to remember to add the due date to every task in the file.

[mvdkwast]

Here you go, @claremacrae

mvdkwast@403ebe7

Keep in mind that it is just a POC at the moment, to see if the workflow works for me in practice :)

I tend to use a composite flow now :

• in my dailies I add no date to the tasks that I intend to do today, this way I see them as late the days after
• Tasks for which I haven't decided on a due date yet also appear as late, forcing me to schedule them if I don't complete them during the day.
• When I know when I will do a task, I will either add a due/scheduled date to it or just move it to another daily, depending on whether I want to keep them grouped with other tasks in the current daily or general laziness.
• Not sure yet if it's very useful to differenciate between date types (due, scheduled, start)

[claremacrae]

Hi @mvdkwast.

Wow! I love it! 🎉 ❤️

Thank you very much indeed for sharing this.

I was able to get it working for me. I made this change, as I would want to use the date in the file name in any location, not just in my daily notes.

diff --git a/src/Task.ts b/src/Task.ts
index 092aa1b..d5ea363 100644
--- a/src/Task.ts
+++ b/src/Task.ts
@@ -393,7 +393,7 @@ export class Task {
 
         // Infer the scheduled date from the file name if not set explicitely
         if (scheduledDate === null && dueDate === null && startDate === null) {
-            const dateMatch = path.match(/daily\/(\d{4}-\d{2}-\d{2})/);
+            const dateMatch = path.match(/(\d{4}-\d{2}-\d{2})/);
             if (dateMatch !== null) {
                 console.log(`Setting scheduled date to ${scheduledDate} from ${path} for "${description}"`);
                 scheduledDate = window.moment(dateMatch[1], TaskRegularExpressions.dateFormat);

I was then able to find undated tasks using has scheduled date - and no doubt would have been able to search by scheduled date.

When I edited a task with an implied date, I could see the implied date in the Edit dialog, but when I saved changes, the file date did not get added to the task.

I do see a few warnings around the svelte code, so that could perhaps be why...

I would love to work towards getting this worked up and published in tasks. I think a lot of people (including me) will be very happy with it.

If you have any thoughts on how to proceed, please do let me know. I would be happy to work with you on this, perhaps coding together remotely, to work this up to a standard for release.

[mvdkwast]

In fact the comment was lying : the first idea was to write the inferred scheduled day when you edit the task. But then I realized that is was annoying, so I decided to store the fact that the date was inferred. This way the scheduled date doesn't get written when you toggle the task status or edit it in the dialog. If you change the scheduled date in the dialog, it should add it correctly to the task and remove its inferred status.

The svelte modifications are not part of the commit, I just added some accelerators to the edit to speed up navigation, but apparently this is not considered good practice 😊

Do you think we would need to allow users to choose which of the date attributes is inferred (start, due, scheduled) instead of always setting the scheduled date ?

If not I see the following steps :

• add config section (enable feature + configure filename pattern)
• better parsing to extract date from filename
• unit tests

If we decided to allow other attributes, a little more logic is required to handle all the cases.

[claremacrae]

Hi @mvdkwast

In fact the comment was lying : the first idea was to write the inferred scheduled day when you edit the task. But then I realized that is was annoying, so I decided to store the fact that the date was inferred. This way the scheduled date doesn't get written when you toggle the task status or edit it in the dialog. If you change the scheduled date in the dialog, it should add it correctly to the task and remove its inferred status.

OK, that makes sense.

The svelte modifications are not part of the commit, I just added some accelerators to the edit to speed up navigation, but apparently this is not considered good practice 😊

I suspect it's about the mechanics of how you added the accelerators, rather than the adding of them.

We should talk about the linting set-up in this project at some point, and see if we can get it set up on your development environment.

Asking as I had to fix several code warnings and errors in order to run the code - which of course is currently absolutely fine as it's a proof of concept, and if it works for you, that's all that matters.

But as soon as you start thinking about contributing code, we will need to code to pass the linting checks.

Do you think we would need to allow users to choose which of the date attributes is inferred (start, due, scheduled) instead of always setting the scheduled date ?

I think at this stage it's more about the timing.

We will need to do that at some point, for example if there are users who only use due filters - they wouldn't want to have to update their searches to add OR scheduled... everywhere.

However, it would be fine to implement it first for just one field, and then add support for others later.

In particular, before we added it for more than one field, I think it would be worthwhile my implementing #1104 - so that the 'is inferred' condition can go inside the TaskDate object, rather than directly in the Task. That will simplify the code and testing tremendously.

If not I see the following steps :

• add config section (enable feature + configure filename pattern)
• better parsing to extract date from filename
• unit tests

If we decided to allow other attributes, a little more logic is required to handle all the cases.

I would add to the list:

• Write user docs

Optimisation that I can add later:

• Extract the date from file name once per file, instead of for every task

How do you feel about setting up a session to have a chat about this, and perhaps work on it together, setting up the linting and writing a first test? My email address is in the GitHub profile.

[claremacrae]

The ability to optionally use file name in date as scheduled date has been released, in Tasks 1.18.0.

Documentation in:
https://obsidian-tasks-group.github.io/obsidian-tasks/getting-started/use-filename-as-default-date/