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davidem  
#1 Posted : Friday, February 10, 2012 1:00:10 AM(UTC)
davidem

Rank: Advanced Member

Joined: 6/24/2011(UTC)
Posts: 147
Location: New York, NY

The capturing of a web "site" as a document is often more coarse than one deals with other stored documents which ManicTime tracks. A single site, like TechNet or MSDN, doesn't really give an indication of what I was actually looking at, but often the page title DOES change in accordance with what I am reading.

It would often seem more appropriate to capture the page title on the document timeline, and be able to easily track totals by that, rather than the site alone. More granular document titles for sites also makes creating AutoTags depending upon the actual page more straightforward (though it can be accomplished by using the Application timeline info).

Lots of application have some notion of a project or document collection, beyond the individual documents: eclipse java projects, .net projects, etc. It would be good if ManicTime could treat the web site as such a collection, while the individual page titles are treated as documents.

I'm ambivalent about whether this should be captured as a separate timeline, since not every application treats items this way, but for those that do, it would be nice if they were capturable, to be captured distinctly from the individual documents titles. They could either be combined as a single item on the Documents timeline as: <project_title> : <document_title>, or on separate Document and Project timelines, but the point is that they are separately extracted and addressable.

Web pages would fit into this paradigm as project_title = <website> and document = <parsed page title>. Programming tools (Eclipse, Visual Studio) would be queried for their notions of project/document.

For apps without specific support in ManicTime, this could be described in general with an expansion of the current CustomTitle parsing, where one could designate a second regex capture group (by number or by name) as the "project", and the default as the "document", not limited to them being "next to" each other in the window title or in some particular order.


admin  
#2 Posted : Friday, February 10, 2012 9:47:57 AM(UTC)
admin

Rank: Administration

Joined: 4/13/2010(UTC)
Posts: 872

Could you give me some example of how it works now and how it should work?
davidem  
#3 Posted : Friday, February 10, 2012 11:46:23 PM(UTC)
davidem

Rank: Advanced Member

Joined: 6/24/2011(UTC)
Posts: 147
Location: New York, NY

for each item, collect both the "document" name, and an optional "project/collection" name, where meaningful


File Visual Studio 2012 AFX LiquidityGateway.cs 120m
File Eclipse Fenics_branch_sept11 /src/com/wf/fx/fenics/Tickets.java 36m
File Acrobat FenicsUserManual.pdf 43m
File Acrobat FenicsPricingModels.pdf 18m
File Eclipse Fenics_branch_sept11 /src/com/wf/fx/fenics/Cust.java 18m
File Eclipse Fenics_branch_sept11 /src/com/wf/fx/fenics/Book.java 6m
File Eclipse Fenics_trunk /src/com/wf/fx/fenics/Cust.java 6m
File Eclipse Fenics_trunk /src/com/wf/fx/fenics/Tickets.java 5m
File Eclipse Fenics_trunk /src/com/wf/fx/fenics/Book.java 2m


for web pages, the "collection" should be the site, while the "document" should be the page title:

Type Application Collection Document time
Web Page IE www.manictime.com Help - ManicTime 11m
Web Page IE msdn.microsoft.com Article nnn - SQL getdate 14m
Web Page IE msdn.microsoft.com Article nnm - SQL join 15m
Web Page IE www.manictime.com Contact form - ManicTime 4m


in the Documents view, have Application and Collection be a separate column in the summary and item views, along with files/folders, and duration in the summary. In the summary, allow the view to be grouped and summed by type/folder, collection or just by file (in whatever order user chooses).


group box: Type, Application, Collection, Document

Type Application Collection Document time
-Files 241m
-Visual Studio 2012 120m
AFX 120m
LiquidityGateway.cs 120m
-Acrobat 61m
FenicsUserManual.pdf 43m
FenicsPricingModels.pdf 18m
-Eclipse 73m
-Fenics_branch_sept11 60m
/src/com/wf/fx/fenics/Tickets.java 36m
/src/com/wf/fx/fenics/Book.java 6m
/src/com/wf/fx/fenics/Cust.java 18m
-Fenics_trunk 13m
/src/com/wf/fx/fenics/Tickets.java 5m
/src/com/wf/fx/fenics/Book.java 2m
/src/com/wf/fx/fenics/Cust.java 6m

-Web Page 44m
-IE 44m
-www.manictime.com 15m
Help - ManicTime 11m
Contact form - ManicTime 4m
-msdn.microsoft.com 29m
Article nnn - SQL getdate 14m
Article nnm - SQL join 15m






davidem  
#4 Posted : Saturday, February 11, 2012 2:15:24 AM(UTC)
davidem

Rank: Advanced Member

Joined: 6/24/2011(UTC)
Posts: 147
Location: New York, NY

for capturing, where you don't have direct API support for an app to determine a filename/project name, you can leverage named/numbered capture groups for regexs. use the default group to capture the document title, a second group for the project

admin  
#5 Posted : Monday, February 13, 2012 10:19:11 AM(UTC)
admin

Rank: Administration

Joined: 4/13/2010(UTC)
Posts: 872

This sounds similar to something we have been discussing for over a year now, to basically join Apps and Docs timeline into one timeline.
We will definitely get to it, but it is a lot of work. Currently timelines are completely separated, the only thing that joins them is time. In order for this to work, this would have to be changed, data would have to be written differently, also presentation on Day view has to change, Statistics....
We will definitely get to it, I'd also love it if it worked this way. But it will take some time.
davidem  
#6 Posted : Monday, February 13, 2012 8:03:30 PM(UTC)
davidem

Rank: Advanced Member

Joined: 6/24/2011(UTC)
Posts: 147
Location: New York, NY

perhaps it would not be the worst half-measure, in the meantime, if there were a separate (additional) "Doc Collection" timeline, then. Perhaps easier to achieve within the current data and presentation models, while allowing us all to get a feel for where such info might be appropriately collected, and how it might be used. As you say, it's not much different than the current separation between Application and Document timelines.
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