I started using FengOffice for organizing tasks of a personal project, but I soon discovered a deal breaker limitation. It was impossible to put tasks in a user-defined sequence. I suggested such a feature, but got a disappointing response…

Andrea, 2010-12-07 20:57
I see that it’s currently not possible to add task sequencing in FengOffice and I understand that in general it can be a difficult feature to implement.

Anyway, the children of a given task should be sortable at user’s will.

Drag and drop is already implemented for changing parent/child relationships. When dragging a task, the receiver gets highlighted if I can drop. So:

From a frontend pov, the only needed feature is a marker to show between siblings when dragging a task around. From a backend pov, the only needed feature is a script for updating a field in the tasks table after a drop.

The tasks table already has got an ‘order’ field. I’ve looked into the code but couldn’t understand if it could be used for this purpose or not. (As a side note, I’d recommend to refactor that name to ‘position’ maybe, because it gets very difficult to tell apart when order is used as an SQL term or as a tasks field, by text searching it)

This user-specified sorting feature can be implemented without any enforcement on the FengOffice side, except for sorting that way after sorting as it currently is. I mean, if I’m viewing tasks sorted by priority, all the subtasks of a given task that share the same priority should be sorted as I specified, and if I didn’t specify any order, then follow the creation order. For making it backward compatible, add a workspace option for subtasks ordering: alphabetic or user specified.

Sorry for being so pedantic about this feature, but I really can’t live without. In fact, it’s very common for me to split a task into subtasks that need to be completed one after another. Each time I complete a task I’d expect the next to be the one after the current, but I always need to look my next task around and mentally rebuild how I intended them to be sequenced: both error prone and time consuming!

(Prefixing tasks names with a number is just a poor man feature, soon unfeasible.)

Francisco Ponce de León, 2010-12-08 09:13
Hello, Feng Office currently does not count with such feature, as you mentioned. In case you are able to develop it yourself, we would be glad to add it in a future release. If you consider doing so, please check out the Developers section in the forum. Otherwise, if you would like to help by sponsoring this feature, please send an email to sales@fengoffice.com. Best regards!