Hi, John.

 

Since I started writing this, there have been good answers to your question 
from Andrei B and Lisa. I agree with their posts but I think mine goes further, 
so I’m posting it. I should really edit it to remove the parts the prior posts 
have already addressed but I’m out of time for this, so I’m sending it with my 
apologies. Here are several issues that I cannot address, perhaps others can. 
Look at the end of this post for places where I say “I don’t know”. Thanks.

 

In one of my first posts to you I mentioned the importance of understanding the 
difference between the order tasks are in when you look at the outliner, versus 
the order tasks are in when you look at a view that takes a filtered subset of 
your tasks and sorts them.

 

Your database of tasks is arranged in a tree structure. When you look at the 
“all tasks” view you see all of your tasks in their outline positions. This 
does not necessarily have anything to do with the locations of the tasks on 
disk. Neither is it a sort that has been applied to the tasks. It’s an outline 
and every task has its place in the outline. 

 

The outline is synched across all of your platforms. When you move a task from 
one position to another in the outline, this is synched and affects the task’s 
position on all of your other platforms. Try this experiment. Be sure your 
desktop and mobile are fully synched (I usually do this by synching one to the 
cloud, then synching the other to the cloud, the synching the first one a 
second time. Now, disconnect your desktop from the Internet (turn off all wired 
and wireless connections.) On the desktop, pick a task and move it to a 
different place on the outline. Now, on the mobile, pick the same task (still 
in its original position) and move it to a new place different from its 
original place and also different from where you put it on the desktop. This 
will create a synch conflict. Synch conflict resolution works well on desktop 
but not mobile (yet) so we need to sync the mobile first. Sync the mobile to 
the cloud, making sure that the desktop is still disconnected from the 
internet. When the mobile sync is done, connect the desktop to the internet and 
sync to the cloud. You should get a “resolve sync conflict” popup. Find the 
task that you voved and click on the three dots in the Details column. You will 
see a Task Difference popup showing the task as it exists on local and remote. 
If this has all worked, you will see a difference in the coded value used to 
track the task’s location in the outline.

 

If you are looking at a view that is showing everything in its outline 
position, you are free to drag any task anywhere at any time, and the change 
will be permanent across all platforms. I am not 100% sure of this but I think 
that you are seeing the outline if hierarchical view is enabled and sort is 
[none] with the manual sort checkbox unchecked.

 

Many useful views are flat views (ie have hierarchy turned off) and some field 
named in the sort area. These views are known to people who used MLOv3 as to-do 
views. In these views, the order of the tasks has nothing to do with the 
position of each task in the outline. If you drag a task to a different 
position, it is now no longer where it should be according to the selected 
sort, which is a problem to be solved. Two possible solutions: (1) put the task 
back where the sort wants it to be, and tell you to stop trying to move it, or 
(b) decide that you didn’t really want the specified sort, you wanted to be 
able to move stuff around yourself, so check the “manual sort” box, ignore the 
other sort parameters, and let you put the tasks wherever you want. Sometimes 
when you move tasks in a flat view you get a popup asking you if you want to go 
to manual sort, other times it just quietly turns on manual sort. I’m not sure 
what determines which will happen.

 

When a view has a manual sort, you can move the tasks around and when you come 
back you will find them still in the same order. I hardly ever use manual sort 
so I don’t know whether or not the revised order persists only in one workspace 
or whether it will appear when you open the same view in a different workspace. 
I also don’t know whether or not saving a view will help. I do know that if you 
have several workspaces and each workspace contains a different manually sorted 
view, you can sort each workspace differently and they will all persist 
separately. In other words, it is not true that there is only one manual sort, 
there can be many.

 

I have read several people saying that the manual sort in the active starred 
view gets synched to mobile, so it must be true. I know that there are other 
views that use manual sort on the desktop, do any of them also exist on mobile 
and if so, does the manual sort sync for them as well? I don’t know. Even more 
interesting, on the current IOS release you can export a view from desktop and 
import it on your iPhone or iPad. If you create a new manually sorted view on 
desktop and export it for import on ios, will the sort order for this new view 
get synched? Again I don’t know.

 

-Dwight

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