503335 - Tasks without a due date should be ordered after tasks with a due date

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 377041

(Calendar :: Tasks, defect)

Description

[Julius Stroffek]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.1) Gecko/20090624 Firefox/3.5
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en-US; rv:1.8.1.18pre) Gecko/20080917 Sunbird/0.9

Clicking the "Restore Natural Order" does not have any effect in the task list. The order remains always the same. Just sort the task according the Name or Due Date and click on "Restore Natural Order".

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Sort the multiple tasks according the column that breaks the default ordering.
2. Click on "Restore Natural Order" menu item at the right side of the list header.
3. You could repeat the above steps for different column in step 1.

Actual Results:  
The order does not change.

Expected Results:  
The order should be changed.

It might seem to be a cosmetic change but it has severe impact on the usability of tasks. Especially when you create multiple tasks and need to change order of tasks. You will never get back to the original default (showing the tasks in the order as they are supposed to be processed).

Comment 1

[Philipp Kewisch [:Fallen] [:📆][:🧩]]

I assume you are using a localization, as I don't see any "Restore Natural Order"? All I see is "Restore Defaults", which only restores the default of what *columns* are shown. It is not possible to manually sort tasks yet, see bug 440462. Please mark this bug as duplicate of bug 440462 if you agree.

Comment 2

[Julius Stroffek]

No, I do not use localization.

Manual reorder of tasks is not sufficient since the number of tasks will grow.

Without applying any specific order by clicking to the task list header the tasks were ordered in the order as they should be processed. The ones over due as first and then ordered by the 'Due In'. Ordering by Due In puts the over due tasks at the end instead of the front.

It was (and still it is not) clear to me what 'Restore Natural Order' was supposed to do exactly, but expected that it will order the tasks in a way it was done by default (which seemed to be natural).

In fact there are two possible ways I would be happy with:
1.) Define what precisely what the "Natural Order" is and make that menu entry to work.
2.) Move the over due tasks in front if the task list is sorted according the "Due In". This seems to me quite reasonable.

Comment 3

[Julius Stroffek]

I am sorry for confusion. Looking again at the way tasks are sorted based on 'Due In' it is evident that in ascending order the over due tasks are placed before the other tasks, however, the tasks without a due date are placed as having the "Due in" equal to 0 and thus and up between those over due tasks (due in less than 0) and other tasks with due date specified.

The problem is than that the "Due In" should be infinity if due date is not specified. However, I would guess that it is currently set to 0 for sorting.

Comment 4

[Stefan Sitter [:ssitter]]

In my opinion this is just misunderstanding. The user can drag and drop the columns in any list view in any Mozilla application to change their order. For example you can move the Due column left to the Title column. The Restore Default functions just restores the default order. It has nothing to do with the sort order inside the list view.

Comment 5

[Julius Stroffek]

Stefan, you are right, when I drag and drop columns around clicking "Restore Natural Order" restores the original order of columns. Since I was not shuffling the columns around I was not able to notice that. That was a misunderstanding from myself.

My problem then could be only fixed by setting a "Due In" to infinity for tasks without the due date when sorting the tasks according the "Due In". Shell I log a new bug for that or that could be discussed here as well?

When you create a task and assign a due date it is quite mandatory. Having a task without a due date naturally means "some time in the future". Therefore those tasks should naturally come at the end of the list and not in the middle of over due tasks and those with a due date.

If you have only few tasks that is not a problem. If you will have few tens of tasks it is a major problem in usability since you need to pickup tasks in the order of "Due In" but you could not give a preference to tasks without due date.

Comment 6

[Philipp Kewisch [:Fallen] [:📆][:🧩]]

I think we've had bugs that wanted just the contrary. Stefan probably knows the bug ids.

Comment 7

[Stefan Sitter [:ssitter]]

Resolve as duplicate of Bug 377041?

Comment 8

[Julius Stroffek]

Agree.
+1

Just a small comment. I think that the menu item I was confused with should be called something like 'Restore Column Order' or something similar that will highlight that the column order is the think that matters.