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dlindquist  
#1 Posted : Saturday, February 26, 2011 6:15:18 PM(UTC)
dlindquist

Rank: Newbie

Joined: 2/26/2011(UTC)
Posts: 3
Location: Calgary, AB
Hi,

We've been trying out ManicTime standard at my workplace for a while now, and it seems to work great. At the moment, 'Standard' is all we need, but there is one feature that would make 'Pro' a no-brainer.

You already have a 'scheduled backup' of the database -- is there any possibility that it would be easy to add a 'scheduled nightly export to XML' feature?

(I'm really most interested in the tags-and-time summary you get when clicking on the 'tags' line, but if it has all the data, I'm even happier.)

The main reason for this is that we'd like to be able to have a semi-automated feed into our internal time-tracking system -- if we can make it nightly export to XML, putting together such a feed would be easy.

If we could see this feature, I would immediately browbeat my boss to get us 'Pro' ;-)

Thanks very much!

(EDIT: Just to clarify, the nightly export doesn't need to be 'all of time' -- just the preceding day or something would be fine.)

Edited by user Saturday, February 26, 2011 6:17:00 PM(UTC)  | Reason: Not specified
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admin  
#2 Posted : Monday, February 28, 2011 11:56:35 AM(UTC)
admin

Rank: Administration

Joined: 4/13/2010(UTC)
Posts: 872
We wanted to add something like this a long time ago but the feature is not so easy.

We could easily add a feature which would get you yesterdays tags, or lets say last weeks.
The problem is, what if somebody tags week before, or makes correction to those tags.

One other possibility would be to always just save changes made from some time. This would work if the service on the other end would also keep track of this, but in this case the XML is unusable to anybody else.

So I guess the only option would be to always output all tags made from the beginning.

I guess this is the main reason why this is still missing. We figured that we need a more interactive service where you could ask for all tags, just changes made from some time or specific dates. We are working on something which will allow this. I think we should have something in a few months.
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dlindquist  
#3 Posted : Tuesday, March 1, 2011 5:38:36 AM(UTC)
dlindquist

Rank: Newbie

Joined: 2/26/2011(UTC)
Posts: 3
Location: Calgary, AB
That's great if this is coming soon!

I agree that there are many gotchas if you try to solve _all_ of the problems.

However, what if you put it in the users hands?

Code:
[x] Every night, export the last ___ days of data to XML at _______________


That way you don't have to try to 'guess' what the user wants (which is difficult) -- they very explicitly tell you what they want. You may not satisfy ALL requirements, but I'm betting you would be hitting better than 50%.

As folks start using it, they may then post feature requests for some additions which might help clarify how people view it and want to use it.

For our purposes, we simply tag things as we go, and very seldom would we go back to change things -- so for us the prior day or days option would work perfectly.

I look forward to seeing this type of feature! Thanks again!
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