Task dependencies would sure be sweet!

[wealthychef1]

What i'd like

I'm unaware of any other task system that does this, but it seems like an obvious killer feature.
What I'd like to do is declare for a given Task A OR Task B:
Task A is not AVAILABLE until task B is FINISHED
"Available" simply means it has an active checkbox. Unavailable would mean it has an "inactive checkbox" whatever that might looks like. "Locked?" "Unavailable to complete?"
And of course these dependencies need to be inspectable and manageable while editing either Task A or Task B.
Capturing such a dependency would be a huge benefit in project management.

Implementation thoughts

I could somehow write a python script to do this, which is what I was thinking of, but the right place for this is in the task manager. This I envision as being fairly simple to implement with a list of dependencies associated with every task.
The dependency lists are only updated when a user explicitly adds dependencies or checks off a task.
Circular dependencies would be checked for when a dependency is added and disallowed at time of creation.
I think that's basically how the whole thing would be implemented in my imagination.
Thanks for any consideration.

[claremacrae]

I’m fairly new to Tasks, but I have been working on the code a bit. I’d love to hear what @schemar says about it, but my thought having read your message several times is that it would be a huge undertaking to implement this, and pretty much necessitate a complete rewrite of the code.

This is because the plugin does not store any association between tasks, even recurring ones.

[schemar]

Thanks, @claremacrae. You are right. The current implementation doesn't allow the plug-in to uniquely identify tasks. Therefore, task dependencies are not an easy thing to add at the moment.
You could probably use something like ^task-abc123 block links to identify tasks. Though that wouldn't be very reliable at all (they can be manually edited, etc.).

[therden]

Hello @wealthychef1,

I believe @claremacrae is correct -- and even if not, a considerable time will likely pass before it is implemented. Perhaps in the interim an approach like the one outlined in the following Comment from another Tasks repo Discussion may be useful to you.

#463 (comment)

[wealthychef1]

Hello @wealthychef1,

I believe @claremacrae is correct -- and even if not, a considerable time will likely pass before it is implemented. Perhaps in the interim an approach like the one outlined in the following Comment from another Tasks repo Discussion may be useful to you.

#463 (comment)

Thank you so much! That is a good approach, essentially maintaining and curating the graph myself in the way I wish the software could ^[I have learned though that doing things "by hand" is often better than automating it in the notes world]. I shall probably implement something like it and thanks for the pointer to a working method.

I understand that holding things in memory in the Obsidian programming model is problematic, I don't fully know why but I accept it! It looks like everything is JIT evaluated, am I right?

Cheers to all who engaged here.

[claremacrae]

Closing as a duplicate of #463.