Item from different Document included in group-by Panes

Jerud

I’m working with G-B Tags and G-B Contacts Panes pointed to Document A.

There is one item which appears in these Panes even though it is from a completely different Document (B). That item has a #tag and appears correctly within the appropriate #tag group. It has no +contact and also appears correctly in the “(no contact)” group. But of course, it should not be included at all.

The stray item is also shown with Breadcrumbs, which G-B Panes should never have since they only point to a single Document. The Breadcrumbs do correctly show Document B for this stray item. It is not a ((mirror or [[link. The stray item still displays correctly in Panes pointed to Document B.

I will watch for other items doing this but don’t know how to reproduce and see nothing special about this item that might cause this. I’ve never seen Legend violate Document boundaries before.

Jorge

Jerud This happens to me too in two situations that it is extremely confusing to get items from other documents.

The Agenda and Calendar views are bringing items from other documents even when focused into a specific item. I might understand why some people might want to have agenda views bringing items from other documents when the agenda view is focused on a root level item. Even more, once @Jay implements the new outline structure hierarchy that will get rid completely on the document abstraction, it will make more sense that an agenda or grouped by view that is focused on the root would bring items from any branch [anyway the top level branches (documents) are sub branches to the root].

But when the pane is focused on any branch it shouldn’t be bringing items from any other branches at all. So the common ask should be that a pane should only include items from the branch it is focused on or its sub branches.

I disagree with @Jerud that group by panes shouldn’t have breadcrumbs. If it wasn’t for breadcrumbs showing up I would have never figured out that the items being shown were actually from another document because they were named exactly the same as items I had in the document the pane was focused on.

I think a better solution to not showing breadcrumbs on group by panes, is to have an option to disable showing breadcrumbs. Breadcrumbs for me are essential to every day work.

Jerud

Jorge Re: breadcrumbs I meant “should” in terms of what I think Legend’s “rule” is governing whether they are shown. It seems to only put them on Panes that are capable of sourcing items across Document lines…

…such as Agenda and Calendar Panes. I have actually appreciated the ability to pull all my calendar events together in one Pane using these Types, however I only use Gsynced events and had always assumed it was only gsynced events that operate like this – more or less as an accident rather than a feature. Since the event on google’s server loses its connection to Legend-specific aspects such as prefix and document I figured it just had to be this way.

But it sounds like you’re saying these Panes will even consolidate Legend-native, “local” events that aren’t synced. Those DO have a document connection and I agree with you the zoom of the Agenda or Calendar pane should respect those boundaries.

I actually would most prefer to have explicit control over breadcrumbs as an independent setting in the Pane Config dialog (list/outline/agenda/groupby/etc.). I often want them when I don’t have them, or don’t want them when I do. Trying to anticipate when they are “appropriate” is impossible given the wide variety of users and their applications, and will be even more impossible once Panes can point to multiple docs.

I haven’t been able to reproduce my original bug above at all, btw. But as you mention, having breadcrumbs would make it a lot easier to spot if I had!

Jorge

@Jay This is one of the most annoying things for me. Having items show up in agenda views that focused to a specific branch from other branches makes new loose to much time and is frustrating.
There are use cases for both behaviors but not having the option to kick outitems from other branches makes it extremely noisy.

My most frustrating example is. I have a work document and a personal document.
1) I have a single agenda today view where I want everything shown from all my nodes, because I need to know everything that needs to be executed today regardless of context.
2) I have a specific agenda view that focuses on my work, so when I am working I don’t want to get distracted with items from my personal projects, or viceversa. Here is where my complain lies, I am constantly having to scroll so much because the agenda view keeps consolidating everything. It is a pain in the wazoo and is my most frustrating user experience in a daily basis, because every day I curse at this.
When I am want to see the adverbs for a specific branch I’d because I want to quickly find the most relevant things to execute. Mixing my overdue items from all my documents makes it unwieldy, as I am tracking tons of pending items, and this makes it impossible to quickly find overdue items for the project I am focused on.

Jerud

Jorge This is my exact struggle as well. I have had to organize my entire Legend “system” around the need to compartmentalize work/personal items in Agenda Panes. I will tell you how I did it in case that helps you – but to be clear I do NOT “like” this arrangement and think I should be able to do it through the Agenda Pane configuration.

After fighting this for 4 years, I finally gave up on using Gcal-synced events and combined all my work and personal tasks into a single Document which has just two top-level branches. I named these using colored-square emoji, both because I like to use color-coding and because I will never accidentally use those characters in the text of any Task, ever.

By not using Gsync-events I can focus the Agenda Pane on a single Document and not get a bunch of noise from events in what I call “breakout projects” that aren’t part of my main, general workflows (work and personal). By putting Work and Personal in the same document I can still look for synergies between Work tasks and Personal tasks using Group-By panes that ‘see’ the whole Document.

So my two branches are “🟩 Work” and “🟫 Personal”. To focus my Agenda Panes on either Work or Personal, I apply a text filter on those emoji characters. Because of inheritance, every item under those top-level branches will “match” for the emoji in the name of its top branch. This would work without using emoji of course – just more care is needed to select a text string that has no chance of being repeated in any item (and also makes sense to you).

I reiterate though: This should NOT have to be how it’s done to get this result. Agenda Panes really should respect Zoom.

Jorge

Jerud Thanks for your notes. That’s where I started by having a single document and a unique keyword for each (I wasn’t using the colorful prefixes though).
Unfortunately my size had grown way too much so I ended up separating them in the hope of improving performance, however later I found that I could set separate encryption keys for each and that served my purpose perfectly because of my work restrictions.
So I’ve been experimenting with what you said, that only Gsynced events get placed in all agenda items regardless of the document they are focused on. It seems to me that when you create an item and associate a date (but not a calendar sync to it) then Legend behaves exactly how you describe it, the items do not appear in other agenda items that are not focused on the document where the item is. The moment you link them to a calendar then they start to appear in all the agenda views regardless of document.

If I remove the calendar link from the item (but keep the date) the item continues appearing in all documents even though it is no longer linked to an external calendar. Only until I remove the date does the item disappear from agenda views that are not focused on its owning document. So it might be here that lies the bug. I think when you remove the calendar link from an item (but keep the date) the item should now only appear in it’s owning document.

My personal use case is that I create 90% my items in Legend (and have legend sync them back to the calendars), so I would have expected that the items that were originated in Legend in a specific document would always retain the reference as to which document is the owning one and only display them in the owning document’s agenda views). Obviously items that were created in any of the external calendars and were brought into Legend by sync would show in all calendar and agenda views (as there is no reference to which document would be the owning one).

Now it’s up to @Jay whether this can be addressed when he enables the single hierarchy database structure or sooner (in case the database structure will take much longer still). @Jay do you know how much more time will it take to implement the single DB structure?

Jerud

Jorge I’ve seen that behavior too, when un-linking a Gcal event and the resulting Local event remains universally visible.

Honestly, the less Google is involved, the better Legend runs. Funny, the drag/drop for emails and calendar items is what “hooked” me on the app but both of those integrations are too flawed to rely upon and I’ve cut them both out. I’ve actually cut email out entirely now too (via mailbird) because it’s just too clunky and unreliable. I’m lucky that my workflows are not very email-driven. My productivity improved substantially once I stripped things down and just stayed within Legend.

Jorge

Jerud Unfortunately I cannot strip email out of my organizational system (I wish I could just strip email out of my life entirely) as I work with a lot of people and despite my darnest efforts, people continue using email to track status and progress on tasks.

Jerud

Jorge I hear you, I wish I could still integrate with email because it was a really nice way to keep tasks and projects connected to email messages, especially for referring back to past conversations. When it worked, it saved me a lot of time. But it rarely worked. If Jay could figure out a truly robust solution that was as quick and reliable as the original drag/drop Gmail integration (especially if it could work with non-gmail accounts), it would be incredible. But I fear that would basically require Legend to become a full-on email client, and that seems like quite a stretch.

One thing I have considered is to simply attach the relevant .eml file on my local drive to items, as I would with a pdf or xls. Then I could open it directly from Legend in my default mail app. But making that attachment happen in the first place is very messy…and that solution doesn’t help mobile or web users…