Using the Task List Table

Choosing Visible Columns and Sorting

Tasks have many properties, and by default only a few of these properties are shown in the task list table. You can change this by right clicking in the task list and choosing the "List Options" pull right menu; it allows you to choose any of the visible columns as a sorting key, or change the visible columns. You can also set the sorting column by simply clicking on a table header. Clicking repeatedly will reverse the sort order. You can also change the visible columns by clicking the little icon which appears to the right of the table headers, straight above the vertical scrollbar, as shown in the following figure:

Note that you can also reorder columns by dragging them around. Note that you can turn off sorting (to get back to your "default" order) by going to the context menu, selecting List Options > Sorting > None.

Exporting to HTML

You can create an HTML version of your task list by selecting "Export" from the list's context menu. The exact visible columns and their relative widths are reflected in the exported HTML. For the user task list you can also choose to export to the "Konqueror" format, which ignores your visible columns and exports in a format which shows the task summary, task description, percent complete and task priority.

Import

You can import certain types of data into the tasklist as well. Currently only iCalendar and xCalendar files are supported, but we hope to support at least ASCII todo files soon.

Cut, Copy, Paste, Delete

These work just the way you would expect it. Select one or more tasks. Then use the toolbar - or context menu or keyboard shortcut - actions to invoke cut, copy, paste or delete. Pasting is only supported into the tasklist at this point; hopefully pasting into a text buffer will work soon.

Searching for Tasks

To search for a particular task, or to only show tasks matching a given set of criteria, use the "Search/Filter..." context menu action. This will bring up a dialog like the following:

To add additional search criteria, click on the "More" button. To remove the last condition from the list, click on the "Fewer" button. By default a task is accepted if it matches any of the conditions. Select the "Match all of the following" checkbox to require ALL conditions to be met.

If a task has subtasks, and the task itself does not match the criteria but one or more of its subtasks do, you have two choices for how this will be shown:

  1. The "Show both the task and the subtask" toggle will cause the (non-matching) parent task to be included in the tasklist, but with a gray icon. This means you can still see the original structure of the tasklist. This is the default. Here's how this looks:

  2. The "Show only the matching subtask" toggle means that matching parent tasks are not shown. The net effect of this is that the tasklist is flattened where there are non-matching tasks.

Note that clicking on the "Search" icon in the toolbar when a tasklist window is active brings up the filter dialog.

Filters are currently not preserved from session to session.

Expanding Subtasks

You can quickly expand all the tasks shown in a tasklist by selecting the "Expand All" context menu item.
Comments & requests to dev@tasklist.netbeans.org. Further information at tasklist.netbeans.org.