another feature request topic shed some light on how manictime treats items in the document timeline (and thus other timelines, too, but I'm specifically interested in Document timeline treatment). I think a useful feature can be implementeted without major overhaul of the way ManicTime stores its data.

It was explained that each event stores the "group" and the "title". For web sites, it treats the "group" as the site/host root, and the "title" as the complete url. We can currently only see summaries by site, not by page/title/url.

Currently when Documents are captured with CustomTitle (or other methods, like for microsoft office, e.g.), it captures the file/document as the 'group', rather than the title - at least this is how it appears to me, since when I filter by a "document", the filter line says "group=<docname>".


if the day summary provided summaries grouped by group, then by title as well (two levels), where it now only allows by group, then manictime could capture both the group (where applicable) and the title from an app, and we could still see summary of what is now captured in the document timeline (the document name for non-websites, the site for websites) without altering your data model, but provide the alternate breakdowns to those who have asked for it.

To capture both the group and document title from the same window title, the CustomTitle parsing could be augmented to support named or numbered capture groups in a single regex (one for the group, the other for the title), or two separate regex search expressions per app config line to capture each. The latter may be easier for users to understand. Your pick.

Actually, the multi-tier aggregating summary view would also serve (partially, at least), a similar request to show the document with the application. You previously mentioned that consolidating the application and document timelines would entail a data model change. You could give an in-kind features, and see what the users think, before embarking on a change to your model.

If I understand your last question correctly, I think the "first match", if it can only find one, should be extracted as the both the 'group' and 'activity' titles, so as to maintain the current behavior. (I'm assuming that's what it does now. Either that, or it is just collecting the 'group', and not the activity, or vice versa, and uncollected one gets populated with the other value automatically whenever it is empty. either way).

While such an enhancement to the CustomTitle plugin would certainly be a necessary step for what I am asking, for my purposes, though, I wouldn't change how I extract the using the customtitle plugin with such a feature without the ability to group simultaneously by both the 'group' and 'activity' in the summary pane.


If I could rename this thread, then, using the correct terminology, it would be "day summary by 'group' and 'activity'". So I'd like the summary pane (on the right, whatever you call it) to allow me to aggregate times by either or both fields:

so, three views:
Group
Activity
Group, Activity

for multi-field groupings, show totals for Group in its own row, with the Activity groupings tiered under that, just as you do with manually created folders. the upper tiers should be collapsible, as now.


P.S.
I actually wasn't aware of how the VisualStudio plugin behaved, I had not used VS yet under ManicTime. As it stands now, without the additional summary pane feature I described, I would actually prefer that the file name (with or without the solution/project) be collected as the 'group', because that is what I am interested in summing by in the summary pane. I don't know if I could achieve that by disabling the VS plugin, and just use the current customtitle plugin. Or maybe the VS plugin is configurable in that regard.

I'm not recalling offhand where I described doing this. If you know, I will review what I mentioned and elaborate, else I'll have to dig around. It sounds like something I would use in the advanced search, but perhaps not. It sounds like something I might not do much any more, given how I now collect Document timeline data more comprehensively.

The fact is, I don't actively "use" ManicTime that much - this is a good thing. Mostly I just let it collect. I do my work review and billing only periodically, and have spent the time to refine the data that ManicTime collects as I go. It's not going to take a ton of more feature changes to allow it to be a mostly completely passive process - the ideal end goal. :)

Was anything like this ever implemented? I'd find it very useful to be able to capture separate values for 'activity' and 'group' using the custom title plugin.

Yes, that would be ideal.

One last thing, the CustomTitle.txt you copy to [Db]/Plugins, its best if you remove all its contents and just add your own rules.

I'll add on our todo list that MT generates this empty file. The way it currently works is:

It will load all rules from this folder, then it will load the rest from Program files.

So keep only your rules in here, and all the rules we update will also be used.

Does this makes sense?

excellent!

is this on the radar at all (hierarchical aggregating in the day view by both the captured group and title/activity)?