Item10403: ActionTrackerPlugin has problems

Attempting to use ActionTrackerPlugin to keep track of things I should work on. I was doing this in TWiki (not too well) and am now converting over to FosWiki (1.1.2). The problems I'm have are:

1. ACTIONSEARCH for "late" actions often turns up actions that are closed. 2. The state dropdown list on the display of an ACTION often shows the wrong state although the state is still internally correct (ie. show "open" when it is "closed"). 3. The edit icon at the end of a row in the table for ACTION or ACTIONSEARCH will bring up a page that appears to be the current page with all formatting removed.

These issues (particularly #1) make ActionTrackerPlugin unusable by most people because it can't be relied on, but ActionTracker is highly important for making FosWiki be an Enterprise Class Wiki.

-- DavidMasterson - 23 Feb 2011

Hmmm. This got slightly reformatted.

Questions to be answered:

1. Does ACTIONSEARCH handle "late" well?

2. Does the "state" show up correctly at all times in ACTION or ACTIONSEARCH tables?

3. Why does the edit icon not work?

-- DavidMasterson - 24 Feb 2011

Number 3 might be Tasks.Item9888 (if you have AliasPlugin enabled).

-- KerstinPuschke - 06 Apr 2011

I don't have a lot of time to spend on trying to reproduce these problems without any test cases or environment details, but what testing I have done doesn't indicate any problem with late, AFAICT the state is correctly displayed (though see Item1966), and the edit icon is working perfectly. Note that the plugin is in prime-time use at several sites that I support directly (though that doesn't disprove anything, I know).

If you can provide an example - a topic containing actions and the search which is misbehaving - I'd be happy to take a closer look.

-- CrawfordCurrie - 19 Apr 2011

Can you suggest a debugging approach with ActionTracker? For instance, is there something I could turn on with actionnotify to make it more verbose about what it is doing? I note that not all closed actions are reported as late -- just some, but I'm not sure which.

My suspicion right now is that this Foswiki repository was copied over from a TWiki repository when I switched to Foswiki and, so, the action IDs from TWiki are "off" somehow with respect to Foswiki, but I'm not sure how.

-- DavidMasterson - 19 Apr 2011

Further update:

Using 'tools/actionnotify state="late"' produces an email with 5 extra closed ACTION items (out of 100+ closed items in the Wiki). I removed those 5 extras from the WIKI and reran the 'actionnotify' with no extras added. Not sure what in those 5 was being picked up by actionnotify.

I also ran an '%ACTIONSEARCH{state="late"}%' and got a LARGE amount of extra non-open items. I don't see a way of telling the ACTIONSEARCH to only search "open" items for late items.

-- DavidMasterson - 20 Apr 2011

BTW, the documentation for ACTIONTRACKER needs some work. For instance,

1. The documentation for ACTIONTRACKERPLUGIN_EXTRAS appears to be incomplete and doesn't really describe the format and/or values of the attributes. There is an example, but that appears to be it.

2. I see the following example in the documentation: '%ACTIONSEARCH{ who="me" open late }%', but no mention of this format in the documentation, so what exactly does it mean ("open && late" || "open || late")?

-- DavidMasterson - 20 Apr 2011

Any actionsearch with state="late" does not list closed items. However there is no way to list only "open" items when search for "late". "late" has a specific interpretation i.e. "out of time and not closed". However you should be able to combine the "open" and "due" search items to achieve what you want.

I had a look at the doc and it's pretty complete AFAICT. I reworded it a bit for ease-of-reading. If you want to suggest any specific improvements, I'd be happy to look at any patch you can offer.

That example should have been removed.

-- CrawfordCurrie - 24 Sep 2011

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