How to sort by updated time

[chenyukang]

Hi, thanks for the great plugin.
My scenario is like this, I write my todos and tasks in all kinds of files, and most of them are not marked with scheduled time and start time, I have a special page with task queries to list them as a board.

My questions is how to sort my tasks in the updated time or created time, I think this is the most natural sorting when there are no more extra meta info.

This is my current query:

not done
sort by description desc
description includes #share

[chenyukang]

Add a temporary hack in QueryRender :

   tasks.sort(function(a, b) {
            const atime = app?.vault.getAbstractFileByPath(a.path);
            const btime = app?.vault.getAbstractFileByPath(b.path);
            if(atime instanceof TFile && btime instanceof TFile) {
                return btime.stat.mtime - atime.stat.mtime;
            }
            return 0;
        } );

[claremacrae]

Thank you, this is really helpful code.

[chenyukang]

Would you like to add updatedTime to task and related query?
I may try to make a PR to provide it.

[claremacrae]

Thank you for the offer.

I would like to think about it. There are several possible approaches, now that I have seen this code. One question is what to store in the task - just the path as now, or the path and the TFile. I wouldn’t want to store times as well, as that is more stuff to keep up to date.

sytone’s tasks-x fork has added TFile to the task, so I might merge that back. I have some quite strict requirements about consistency between the two code based, for future compatibility, so please let me think about for a little while first.

What would be helpful is any ideas you have for what the commands should be.

For example:

sort by ctime
sort by cdate 
sort by mtime 
sort by mdate 

group by cdate 
group by mdate

mdate before|on|after
cdate before|on|after

The group and filtering would only work on whole days, hence only suggesting cdate and mdate...

The sorting would use times as well, hence considering the time varieties.

The thing is that mtime/mdate/ctime/cdate are very much programmer jargon. But I don’t have any other ideas.

Any suggestions or ideas very welcome!

[chenyukang]

Yes, there is some stuff not determined.
Another thing I think is hard, if we use the cdate or mdate from the file, it's actually not accurate, in the scenario of a file containing many tasks.

But if we want to get an accurate time for a specific task, it needs much more extra work.

For my daily usage, my hack is enough for me 😁

I didn't know obsidian-tasks-x before, seems this fork also adds some other features like SQL query.