[Kanban] List history for cards

[AshRubigo]

This might be a more difficult idea.

Currently cards don't track when they were added to a particular column. This is useful in determining how long a task took, or whether it was completed before or after another, as examples.

A solution might be to have a 'kanban column history' field for all the cards, holding items that refer to the date of the move and the title of the column it was moved to, such as [[YYYY0MM0DD0hh0mm0ss0XXX||Column tiddler title]]. The contents of the field could be revealed by pressing a button on each card, showing something like:

History:
(2021/01/02 01:01:01:001) Column tiddler title
(2021/01/01 01:01:01:001) A different list tiddler

[BurningTreeC]

Thanks for the idea @AshRubigo

I'll have to think about this a bit.

Would you mind giving me some examples how this could be used?

[AshRubigo]

Kanban boards are great for displaying what, but not so much when. Ultimately the purpose is to help in recalling the state of some project, and 'when' can be just as useful picking up where you left off after weeks/months away. I might ask:

• Which of these 2 completed tasks did I start doing first?
• Which of these 2 completed tasks took the longest?
• Was this task previously complete, but returned to in-progress, and when did that happen?
• Was this card always low priority?
• Did I start working on these 2 tasks at a similar time?
• Did I ever start that task, or did I move it back to the 'todo' column at some point?

Further, even if you didn't want to add any additional time-related features to the plugin, since a fully fledged project manager likely wasn't your initial plan, history tracking would be very nifty for those extending the plugin with custom functionality. I'd like to have a changelog of sorts for all my kanban boards, and a more extravagant version of that would be a gantt chart.

[BurningTreeC]

Ok thanks for the explanation :)

• a newly added item should get a timestamp and a reference to the column it was added to
• when moving items between columns the items should also get a timestamp and a reference like from-to

did I get this right?

[AshRubigo]

Not even from-to. Let's take this example of a kanban column history field of a card (note [[||]] might not be the best format):

[[20210102000000000||Column B]] [[20210101000000000||Column A]]

Here we have a history of the columns a card was in. Each entry in this list has the date and location of the move, and that is all that needs to be recorded. From this we know at midnight 1st January 2021 the card was created in Column A, then exactly 24 hours later it was moved to Column B. By extension we know that the card was moved from Column A to Column B, and when that happened.

That information can then be used in any way by you or the user, such as reformatted to be more human-readable in a change log for a board with a macro <<kanban-board-history>>:

!! History

* 2021/01/02 12:00:00:000 - [[Card B]] to [[Column C]]
* 2021/01/02 00:00:00:000 - [[Card A]] to [[Column B]]
* 2021/01/01 08:00:00:000 - [[Card B]] to [[Column A]]
* 2021/01/01 00:00:00:000 - [[Card A]] to [[Column A]]

[BurningTreeC]

Hi @AshRubigo, I've now added this functionality but the <<kanban-board-history>> macro is missing

Whenever a card gets created or added to a column the kanban-history field of a card gets populated with a string of the form:

[[20210102-120000000,column: columnName]]

[AshRubigo]

Wow, that's amazing turnaround!

I would recommend removing the hyphen in the middle of the date, since then it would be in-line with the format of the 'created' field of tiddlers.

[BurningTreeC]

Thanks @AshRubigo , I've removed the hyphen now. It might be that this works only with the current prerelease of tiddlywiki. I haven't tested it with the current 5.1.23 release