Add separators for tasks from different notes/files

[wenlzhang]

Currently, all tasks are shown together without any separators when querying them. It may also be helpful to have some kind of separators for tasks from different notes. The separators can be a dimmed horizontal lines that separate tasks from different files.

Of course, for some users, there can be too many separators, as the tasks may come from many files. Therefore, this option may be configurable from the configuration pane.

[owenvachell]

I think this would also benefit from being able to group by file and/or directory. Although it looks like the plugin is already sorting by filename. so this is likely to be naturally taken care of.

[schemar]

I think this is a duplicate of https://github.com/schemar/obsidian-tasks/discussions/65
Can you confirm or deny that?

[schemar]

I deleted #65 in order to clean up a bit. This was the text:

When creating a tasks code block, it should be possible to add grouping to the query.
If tasks shall be grouped, split the cached tasks into groups after filtering, but before sorting.
Sort each group individually.
Put a h4 of the group before the grouped items (e.g. #### 2021-09-12 or #### DONE)

Grouping should be possible by:

• Due date
• Done date
• Priority
• Path/File
• more...?

Example:

group by due date

Question: Is this really necessary? Right now you can have “groups” by having multiple ```tasks blocks below each other.

[owenvachell]

I see your point, and this is how I currently do it. Would be good to be able to do that with a single block though. More of a 'nice to have' in my view

[AlexBurkhardt]

This feature would be very useful and more than just nice to have. I have tasks from an always changing number of files in my ```tasks block. Keeping a separate block for each file up to date manually sounds very time consuming.

[czottmann]

I am in the same boat as AlexBurkhardt, and would appreciate path-based grouping for the same reason.

[schemar]

Thanks for further input. I cannot promise anything, but I will have some time in October to work on some highly rated discussions. Maybe I can have a look.

[Taitava]

I agree with grouping. Especially I'd like to see an ability to group by the containing folder.

I'm very new to this plugin, so please let me know if there's already some way to see in which folder each task resides in. I can see that task items mention their file names, but I'm more interested in the folder name, because I have a vault for school stuff, and one folder for each school subject. Then, inside folders, my file names can be just dates like "2021-09-23.md" indicating the day when I wrote that content, but the date file name is not so informative in a task list.

Thanks for support! 🙂

[schemar]

Hi @Taitava,

I understand your request. I won’t be able to add that soon, as I don’t think that a lot of people would benefit from it.

As a workaround, you could have multiple Tasks queries with a path includes <folder name> filter where you replace <folder name> with the name of the folder that includes your school subject. If they aren’t to many and/or you use Templater, that could already help, I hope.

[wenlzhang]

@schemar With more and more tasks managed by Tasks, I feel that it would be very useful if one can group tasks, e.g. based on due date.

As suggested, one can use multiple blocks to achieve the effect of grouping. However, the achieved effect of this method would be still be very different than the group by due date command. For instance, one may want to see what would happen say in the next two to three weeks during GTD Weekly Review, so that one can prepare for something in advance. In this use case, it can be non-trivial to create so many blocks for achieving this in a non-daily note.

[schemar]

Yes, I also think it would be useful. It's more a matter of priorities at the moment.

[claremacrae]

@schemar I'm in the processing of moving about 500 tasks from ClickUp to Obsidian Tasks, so am pretty desperate to have this feature, and seriously debating having a go at implementing it.

Could you offer any pointers about areas of the code to look at, as a starting point?

[schemar]

If you wanted to implement this, you would need to look at QueryRenderer::createTasksList(): https://github.com/schemar/obsidian-tasks/blob/main/src/QueryRenderer.ts#L143

You would need to group the tasks by files (keeping their original sorting) and then output separate blocks.

Please keep in mind that the tasks aren't necessarily sorted by origin file. If you want to separate them by file, you would need to add a new query parameter in Query to not break existing vaults: https://github.com/schemar/obsidian-tasks/blob/main/src/Query.ts

[claremacrae]

Thank you - that's a great help...

[claremacrae]

Just want to check my understanding...

I know that this issue is focussed on grouping by note/file.

However, I also as see this as a first step on the way to a more general grouping mechanism, which I am very desperate for - pretty much as described in #17 ...

So I believe that the new instruction will begin group by...

And since the filter for file path is path, it makes sense for the new instruction to be:

group by path

I would start by making it group by the path from the root of the vault, so I would start by generating something like:

#### Folder 1/File 1

- [ ] task 1
- [ ] task 2

#### Folder 1/File 2

- [ ] task 1
- [ ] task 2

[schemar]

Looks good to me! ☺️

[claremacrae]

A bit of an update...

I've been making a reasonable amount of progress, I feel, and I've got an implementation of the grouping code I'm quite pleased with.

However, my challenge is around adjusting the rendering code, as I don't have any experience with async, await and Promise.

I know how I want to have the new code obtain the groups, iterate over the groups, and draw the headings in between.

But I want to be sure I won't break the current code in some subtle way. So my plan is to work on a tiny pull request that slightly reworks the current rendering code into a form where it will be really easy to add the grouping code.

I'm hoping that this will be relatively easy to review... 🤞

[claremacrae]

OK: initial preparatory PR created: #530

[claremacrae]

Well, it's a long way to go yet, but in my development version, I've got tasks divided up by the file path!

[dmkash]

This is exactly what I came here hoping was in the works!! I have a note with multiple headings and query blocks, but that won't be sustainable for long and, honestly, adds a lot of whitespace.

[claremacrae]

Just to note that I’ve got a pretty complete implementation of grouping that I’m using successfully. @schemar if you ever get to the stage that you have the capacity to review and merge PRs, I’d be happy to work it up for release.

[schemar]

You can always open the PR 😊 Even if it may take a while until I can answer.

[claremacrae]

That risks me doing a lot of work like documentation with no guarantee that the work will be reviewed, or that the upstream code will look the same by the time it is reviewed.

I’d love to help others with this, but I’ve already spent days of my time on the topic, and it will be days more of work to make it releasable - so naturally I’ll do that when I have more confidence in a timely review.

I’m also happy to spend an hour or two pairing with you to show you what I’ve done.

[claremacrae]

To anyone here who is comfortable cloning a fork of this project and testing their own build of it...

I now have an in-progress pull request that implements the first few group by options: #644

I'll be adding some comments to the code before finalising the PR, but it should definitely just work already...

Here is the current user documentation on the new option:
https://github.com/schemar/obsidian-tasks/blob/65fd928948a6922f4c6c8c5b90fe16e4dacd54fd/docs/queries/grouping.md

And there is a new CSS class tasks-group-heading, so you can do styling things like:

h5.tasks-group-heading, h6.tasks-group-heading {
    color: var(--text-muted) !important;
    background-color: rgba(240, 240, 240, 0.94) !important;
}

h4.tasks-group-heading, h5.tasks-group-heading {
    text-decoration: underline !important;
}

[claremacrae]

Here's an example of 3-level grouping, by folder, filename and heading:

[czottmann]

Beautiful work, thanks @claremacrae :) Really appreciate your (and @schemar's!) efforts.

[claremacrae]

#644 Is now merged and will be in the next release.

[claremacrae]

I'm pleased to announce that Tasks 1.6.0 has a group by instruction. Documentation is available.

[claremacrae]

If there any specific questions about this, or requests for new types of group, it would be helpful for them to be in separate discussions. Thank you!