#61 Task notes

[MalvadoXES]

I would like to see a tasks notes section for short jobs. For example. I do not want to create a task for each help desk ticket I work on. I would like to create a generic help desk ticket category and then put the ticket number I am working on in a note.

[karmapolis]

Yes please!!! I second this request! PTM Tasks, according to PTM UI's ease of use, are a define-once & use-many kind of object because PTM's UI (great as it is) is not comfortable enough for defining Tasks all the time. Instead, the proposed Task Notes are essentially unique (define-once & use-once).

For example, I have a PTM Task called "Phone call with Mr. Jones", but I want my Task Notes for each phone call to differ, so as to take notes on the content of the phone call.

Unfortunately, I don't think PTM can efficiently implement Task Notes with its current design, because there doesn't seem to be a concept of Activity: the user may be doing a single Activity (i.e., one PTM Task and one Task Note) but it will be represented as several Time Lapses within PTM. Consecutively repeated PTM Tasks may get summarized afterwards into one PTM Task, but doing the same with Task Notes would carry the large overhead of repeating the Task Note value (possibly a varchar(n) with a large enough n?) over all elementary Time Lapses, and then the summarization process wouldn't be trivial either, since it would have to do a text comparison between varchars to see if consecutive Task Notes are identical.

Ideally it should be possible to enter the Task Note in the most immediate way, with as few clicks as possible, and it should be possible to recall the current Task Note in the same way, possibly altering it if needed.

[karmapolis]

Here's an idea for implementing Task Notes with the current PTM design. Let's add a Notes field to the TasksLog table. Let the user _easily_ add and modify a temporary CurrentTaskNote variable (a string value stored in memory). When the Task changes (i.e., when a new TasksLog record is entered whose TasksLog.TaskId field differs from the previous record's one), let's commit CurrentTaskNote to the previous record's TasksLog.Notes field. Thus, as long as we are doing a single Task then no matter how many consecutive Lapses (10-min time intervals) pass we will be able to add and modify our current task's note. Just before changing tasks, our old note is commited to the last Lapse that corresponds to that Task, and a new (empty) CurrentTaskNote value is initialized.

Afterwards, when summarizing TasksLog records, we should also summarize the Notes fields into a single one (per resulting record) by concatenating all elementary Notes fields together.