How to duplicate taskwarrior sorting of tasks in dataview table or list?

[wealthychef1]

Is there a way to compute an urgency for each task ala taskwarrior¹ and then sort the items according to that?
I imagine in DataviewJS it would be easier, but would be happy to see this work in straight query language too.
Thanks!
P.S. I know the Tasks plugin does this sorting, but I want to take advantage of the dataview Tables formatting.

Footnotes

1. https://taskwarrior.org/docs/urgency.html ↩

[AB1908]

How does tasks do it?

[wealthychef1]

I do not know. It is not exposed and I am not a plugin developer. Internally, it calculates an "urgency" value for each task, presumably when any task is added and at startup during indexing or some such. I'm not informed enough to know what to do with this, but here is the part of the source code I think that is operative. https://github.com/obsidian-tasks-group/obsidian-tasks/blob/main/src/Task.ts

[wealthychef1]

I suddenly realized you might just not have noticed my footnote to the algorithm in my original post. Here it is again: https://taskwarrior.org/docs/urgency.html

[AnnaKornfeldSimpson]

FYI if trying to use the Tasks code to understand the urgency calculation: the Tasks plugin urgency calculation code has some discrepancies with the documentation (it's a known issue on the issue tracker for that plugin). It may be useful to look at the Urgency.test.ts for obsidian-tasks along with the Urgency calculation code since the tests match the code and the docs might not.

[wealthychef1]

I'm not trying to use the Tasks code to understand the calculation. I merely offered it up as a plugin that already does this because I felt someone would point that out. :-). I'm not capable at the moment of doing anything useful with that code such as somehow using it in dataview. My real purpose is to use taskwarrior sorting in dataview table or lists as per the thread title.

[AnnaKornfeldSimpson]

Sorry, that comment was more for AB.

[AnnaKornfeldSimpson]

Having looked at the description in your footnote (thanks for that!), I will also note that the tasks plugin only supports some of coefficients from taskwarrior - for example, as far as I know there is no concept of "+next" or "blocking" in obsidian-tasks. If you were going to make your own calculation, you would probably want to first decide which features and coefficients you want to include and how to treat tasks that are missing certain fields that you want to use as coefficiencts. For example, if a task does not have a due date, where do you want to put it in your urgency calculation?

[AB1908]

Great breakdown Anna. Sorry I haven't had the time to keep up with this convo but I did like taskwarrior a lot.

[AnnaKornfeldSimpson]

@AB1908 Could you explain why/when FLATTEN can be used in the temporary variables / breaking computations into pieces context?
That is something I remain confused about, conceptually. Thanks!

[AB1908]

So let's say you have a field that contains an array, and you want to use this array as the index to query against. Think of comma separated values in a single field. If this is really all you need, you can open that up to easier querying by flattening that into the "source" as opposed to doing a bunch of trickery with map(), filter() etc.

[wealthychef1]

That is a clear explanation I think, except for now I'm curious about all that "trickery" you mentioned, purely from a standpoint of learning the language better. Anyhow, looking at
https://blacksmithgu.github.io/obsidian-dataview/query/queries/#flatten
This is an example where IMHO it would be really helpful if the documentation example contained the frontmatter YAML so I could see what the connection it has to the code provided. A concrete example would help newbies like me understand the reason for FLATTEN to be used or not used.
I don't see reference in the documentation to temporary variable storage. I do believe @AnnaKornfeldSimpson implied this to be an undocumented feature. Is this because the feature might change?
Thanks for such fast and thoughtful replies as usual.

[AB1908]

I've gotten around to working on the docs but might need a few more weeks to flesh it out. I think I'll push the current PR and then create a separate PR so we can at least have some of it live.

[ljbenn]

Has anyone of you figured out how to do this?

[holroy]

Here is some boilerplate code to build an urgency for a task in a normal query:

```dataview
TASK
WHERE tags AND !contains(tags, "Agenda")
FLATTEN sum(list(
  choice( contains(tags, "task"), 15, 0),
  choice( due > date(2023-01-01), 10, 0),
  choice( due, 7, 0),
  choice( icontains(text, "e"), 3, 0 )
)) as urgency
LIMIT 20
FLATTEN urgency + " « " + text as visual 
SORT urgency DESC
```

The example coefficients (and source query) are a little random based upon what kind of tasks I had in my test vault, but the gist of the idea should be easy enough to follow up on and to build your own urgency list (or to mimic the one from that other plugin).

The FLATTEN ... as visual just serves the purpose of showing the calculated urgency, and you can of course drop/skip that line if you don't want to see the actual urgency value.