Action Tracker Plugin

It takes the skills of a juggler to keep track of all the demands that modern life makes on us. Wouldn't it be great if we could capture what we have to do at the time we think of it, and be able to get a to-do list on demand? No more fighting with post-it notes, no more forgetting actions from the minutes of obscure meetings, and remember your partners birthday every year into the bargain!

This plugin provides support for tracking actions embedded in TWiki topics. Actions captured this way can then be tracked from anywhere you want.

This is particularly useful for meeting minutes. As you write the minutes during the meeting, you simply enter the actions into the text and as soon as the topic is saved, the actions "go live". For example, at a recent meeting of the British Cabinet:

GordonBrown agreed to a zero tax rate for all self-employed software engineers, to make up for past unfair treatment.
%ACTION{ created="2008-02-04" creator="Main.EbenMoglen" due="2008-04-01" state="open" uid="000001" who="Main.GordonBrown" }% Repay all unfairly levied taxes
%ACTION{ created="2008-02-04" creator="Main.EbenMoglen" due="2007-12-25" state="open" uid="000002" who="Main.AlistairDarling" }% Contact Santa to find out who is going to pay for it
AlistairDarling observed that this might adversely impact the government hors d'ouvres budget.

But that's not the only application. The action tracker can also be used for:

• personal to-do lists
• highlighting things for attention
• reminding you of important events

Actions are nicely formatted for display, and automatic notification of actions is supported using 'cron'.

Features

• Actions can be embedded in TWiki topics.
• Actions can be listed using searches.
• Automatic action state e-mail notification.
• Actions can be assigned to individuals, or to predefined groups.
• Fully configurable.

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Syntax Rules

Actions

Write the command %ACTION{ attributes }% anywhere in a TWiki topic. All the text following the final % up to the next end-of-line is taken as the action description. Standard attributes are

Name	Value	Description	Auto-completed
who	See People	The person or team responsible for completing the action.	current user
due	See Date Formats	The due date
state	open or closed	Set to open if the action is still open; set to closed if the action is closed. To extend the state set, see Non-standard attributes.	open
notify	See People	wikinames, or e-mail addresses, of people to notify when the action changes. See Notification for details on action notification.
creator	See People	Who created the action.	current user
created	See Date Formats	Date the action was created.	today
closer	See People	Who closed the action.	if (and only if) state="closed", current user
closed	See Date Formats	Date the action was closed, if ever.	if (and only if) state="closed", today
uid	6 digit number	Unique ID of the action. See UIDs.	calculated

For example,

%ACTION{ who="TWikiGuest" due="2 Jan 2004" state="open" notify="AttillaTheHun" }% An action for TWikiGuest

If the action description doesn't all fit on one line you can use shell-style here-document syntax to grab the next few lines. For example,

%ACTION{ who="LittleOysters" due="2 Jan 1884" state="open" }% <<EOF
The time has come, the walrus said,
To speak of many things.
Of shoes, and ships, and sealing wax,
Of cabbages and kings.
EOF

The delimiter must be a sequence of alphanumeric characters, and the closing delimiter must be on a line of its own.

The fields with an entry in the 'Auto-completed' column are automatically filled in, if they are missing, whenever someone saves the topic containing the action. The default values are as indicated in the table. You can override this behaviour by providing values for any of these attributes when you type the action. Note: you must not provide a value for the uid (see UIDs) field!

Note that the due field is not auto-completed. If you don't specify a due date for an action, the action is treated as due on a 'to be decided' (TBD) date. TBD actions are always shown in action searches, to help encourage you to timeframe them.

Action searches

Write the command %ACTIONSEARCH{ attributes }% anywhere in a TWiki topic. Standard attributes are

Name	Value	Description
who	See People	Person responsible for closing the action.
notify	See People	Persons who want to be notified of a change
state	late, or any legal state value	Set to late to search for late actions; set to any any legal state value to search for actions in that state. See Settings for details on how to extend the state set. You can also use a Perl regular expression, which must match the entire state name e.g. state="open|closed" will match either open or closed states, but no other states, and state="(?!closed).*" will match every state except closed. Google for perlre for help with Perl regular expressions.
within	a number of days	Search for actions that are within a number of days of their due date. Usually used in conjunction with other attributes, such as state="open". If you give it a simple number N, it will match actions that are due within N days either side of the current date. If you give N with a leading '+', this restricts the search to N days in the future. If you give N with a leading '-', it matches only actions that fell due in the last N days.
web	Perl regular expression	A regular expression that matches the names of all the webs to search. If this attribute is omitted, the default is to search only the current web. Searching many webs is much slower, especially in a large installation. Webs marked NOSEARCHALL will not be searched.
topic	Perl regular expression	A regular expression that matches the names of all the topics to search. If this attribute is omitted, the default is to search all the topics in the selected webs.
due	Absolute or relative date expression. See Date Formats	Due date for the action.
creator	See People	Who created the action.
created	Absolute or relative date expression. See Date Formats	Date the action was created.
closed	Absolute or relative date expression. See Date Formats	Date the action was closed, if ever.
closer	See People	Who closed the action.
uid	6 digit number	Unique ID of the action.
format	Presentation format	See Formatting tables
header	Presentation format	See Formatting tables
footer	Presentation format	See Formatting tables
orient	Presentation format	See Formatting tables
separator	Presentation format	See Formatting tables
sort	Comma-separated list of field names	Fields to sort the matched actions by. For example, sort="$who,$due" will sort by who first and then due. This field is optional; by default the table will be sorted by due date.

For example,

%ACTIONSEARCH{ who="me" state="late" }%
%ACTIONSEARCH{ who="me" open late }%
%ACTIONSEARCH{ who="TWikiGuest" state="open" within="7" }%
%ACTIONSEARCH{ web=".*" who="[email protected]" state="open" within="7" }%

When you are searching for fields containing dates (such as closed, created and due) you can prepend one of the conditions >, <, >= and <= to the date. For example, closed=">1-Jan-1999" will match all actions that have been closed at any time since 1-Jan-1999, and created=">= 1-Jan-2000" will match all actions created this century. You can also specify dates relative to the current date and time. See Date Formats for details of how to specify relative dates. For example,

%ACTIONSEARCH{ state="closed" closed="> 7 days ago"}%

will search for all actions closed in the last 7 days.

Date formats

Absolute date formats

Absolute dates are required in action specifications. Date formats must be as recognised by Time::ParseDate. The following absolute date formats are recognised. Dates containing spaces must be enclosed in double-quotes.

• Dow, dd Month yy
• Dow, dd Month yyyy
• Dow, dd Month
• dd Month yy
• dd Month yyyy
• Month day{st,nd,rd,th}, year
• Month dd yyyy
• yyyy/mm/dd
• yyyy/mm
• mm/dd/yy
• mm/dd/yyyy
• mm/yy
• yy/mm (only if year > 12)
• yy/mm/dd (only if year > 12 and day < 32)

You are strongly recommended never to use the 'mm/dd/yyyy or mm/dd/yyyy' formats, to avoid confusing users in Europe (like me). Note that due to limitations in the Time::Parsedate module, dates before 1970 will not work as expected.

Relative date formats

When you are searching for fields containing dates (such as closed, created and due) you can specify dates relative to the current date and time. For example:

Syntax	Example	Notes
Dow after next	Tuesday after next
Dow	Tuesday	last Tuesday
next Dow	next Thursday
tomorrow	tomorrow
today	today
yesterday	yesterday
last dow	last wednesday
last week	last week	7 days ago
now	now
now + count units	now + 2 years
now - count units	now - 3 weeks
+ count units	+ 31 days
- count units	- 2 months
count units ago	10 days ago

Valid units are minutes, hours, days, weeks, years.

People

People are identified to the action tracker using a wikiname (e.g. Main.WilliamWallace or simply WilliamWallace) or an e-mail address (e.g. [email protected]). The e-mail address is useful if you want to notify people who aren't registered in the wiki, but bear in mind that if they are outside your firewall, they'll get action notifications but the chances are they won't be able to edit pages and close actions. Very annoying!

E-mail addresses of people are found by the process described below.

You can also use the shorthand me for the currently logged-in user (this is TWikiGuest unless you have been prompted for a username and password). In actions, this will automatically be expanded when the topic is saved, and in searches it will match the currently logged in user.

Groups

You can assign an action to a group defined using a TWiki group topic (see TWikiDocumentation). Alternatively you can give a list of people as the value of the attribute. For example,

%ACTION{who=TWikiAdminGroup ...}%
%ACTION{who="KnutHaraldsen,MagnusMagnusson" ...}%

Note in general you should not use these mechanisms for assigning actions, because the actions so created are not specific. Actions should be assigned to one person only, so that it's clear who is responsible for them.

UIDs

For administrators only: Each action is assigned a Unique Identifier (UID) when it is created. This UID is a six-digit number, and is generated when the action is first saved by incrementing a number in a special file (pub/_work_areas/ActionTrackerPlugin/UIDRegister under the TWiki installation). If this file is accidentally deleted, or is not writable, then you will have problems and you may get duplicate UIDs. Normally this won't matter a hoot, as UIDs only have to be unique within a single topic, but if the file is persistantly inaccessible it could be a bit of a nuisance.

Notification

ActionTrackerPlugin comes with a notifier script, like the mailnotify script used for WebNotify (see MonitoringSiteActivity? for more information on setting up mailnotify). This script allows you to:

• examine all the actions in all webs (except those specified NOSEARCHALL) and notify owners of the state of actions,
• find actions that have changed state, and notify people who have registered an interest in that action.

The frequency with which actions are notified depends on how you set up your cron (or equivalent) jobs on the server.

The actionnotify script interprets its parameters as a search expression of the same type as that used in %ACTIONSEARCH%. All actions which match that expression will be notified to their owners. For example:

 actionnotify "header=\"| Assigned to | Due ||\"" format=\"'| $who | $due | $edit |'\" state="open" 

Note that the actionnotify script must be run from the bin directory. This is so it can pick up the TWiki path configuration file, setlib.cfg.

For example, you could set up the cron jobs as follows:

0 * * * * cd /home/twiki/bin && ../tools/actionnotify "state=\"late\""
0 8,16 * * * cd /home/twiki/bin && ../tools/actionnotify "state=\"open\" within=\"3\""
0 0 * * * cd /home/twiki/bin && ../tools/actionnotify "state=\"open\" within=\"7\"
0 0 * * 1 cd /home/twiki/bin && ../tools/actionnotify "state=\"open\" within=\"30\"

(If you don't know cron, the first 5 fields are minute, hour, day of month, month and day of week. * means 'every'). This crontab will notify actions according to the schedule:

1. Actions that are late will be notified every hour, on the hour
2. Actions that are still open within three days of their due date will be notified twice a day, at 8am and 4pm
3. Actions that are still open within seven days of their due date will be notified once a day, at midnight.
4. Actions that are still open within thirty days of their due date will be notified once a week, at midnight on monday.

A rather aggressive schedule!

Note: At Wind River they notify folks three times a week on Mon, Wed and Fri for open action items due within 8 days. Crontab entry for geeks:

0 0 * * 1,3,5 (cd .../bin; ../tools/actionnotify state=open within=8 'web=[CEIMPSW].*' > .../logs/actionnotify.txt 2>&1)

You can configure the fields which are scanned to detect state changes; see Settings.

Translating names to e-mail addresses

The wikiname of the user to be notified is translated to a mail address according to the following rules:

• If the user has a personal page, and that personal page contains a line or lines matching
  spaces * Email: email address
  or
  spaces * E-mail: email address
  Alternatively if the topic is a group definition (the name ends in 'Group') then the line
  spaces * Set GROUP =
  is used to determine the wikinames of the people in the group. These are resolved to email addresses recursively. If that fails,
• If they appear in any WebNotify in any web, in the form of a line that gives an email address, then that address is used.
• If this fails and the 'who' name is a valid e-mail address, for example person@domain.co.uk, then that name is used.

Note: If a name cannot be translated to an e-mail address using the mechanisms described above, a warning will be output to data/warning.txt..

The actionnotify script is also used to notify users who have registered an interest in being notified when an action changes. This function of the script is activated when you use the changedsince parameter. changedsince is used to specify the time period within which changed actions are interesting. Any action which has changed in the given period will be notified to all users who have registered an interest in that action using notify. The changedsince value is a relative date string, which uses the following formats

• yesterday
• last dow
• last week
• now - count units
• - count units
• count units ago

where units may be minutes, days, hours, weeks, months or even years. count is just an integer. dow is the name of a day of the week. For example:

changedsince="last monday"
changedsince="now - 3 days"
changedsince="- 36 hours"
changedsince="3 days ago"

Obviously you have to be careful to synchronise your changedsince expression with the activation of your cron job. The ideal is to specify the same delta as the gap between cron activations. For example,

0 0 * * * cd /home/twiki/bin && ../tools/actionnotify 'web="News" changedsince="yesterday"'

will notify registered users of action changes that occurred in the last 24 hours. Note the use of single quotes to prevent expansion in the shell.

Notes:

1. Not all action changes get notified, only changes to certain sensitive fields. You can change the set of fields that are sensitive to changes by setting the NOTIFYCHANGES parameter, as described in Settings, below.
2. Unlike all other search terms, changedsince works as an OR term rather than an AND term. If you use a compound expression like late,changedsince=yesterday, this will not give you all late actions that changed since yesterday. Instead, it will give you all late actions and all actions that changed since yesterday.
3. If you give the parameter DEBUG to the actionnotify script, it will print out the mails that would have been sent to STDOUT. This is useful for debugging, and may be useful if you have some other processing in mind (such as piping to an alternative mail program).
4. changedsince requires RCS, and will not work with RcsLite.

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Customisation

Formatting search tables

The header, footer, =format, separator and orient parameters of %ACTIONSEARCH{}% support formatting of the action table using a similar syntax to that described in FormattedSearch. For example:

%ACTIONSEARCH{ web="Directors" state="open" format="|$who|$text|$edit|" header="|*Director*|*Films*||" footer="|*Director*|*Films*|" separator="$n" orient="rows" }%

The available $formattingtokens are:

Name:	Expands To:
$who	Who is responsible for the action
$due	When the action is due
$state	Current state of the action (see also note below)
$notify	Who to notify when the action state changes
$closed	When the action was closed, and who closed it
$creator	Who created the action
$created	When the action was created
$edit	A link to the action editor for this action
$uid	Unique identifier for the action
$web	Name of the web containing the action
$topic	Topic name containing the action
$text	Formatted action text
$link	An icon that links to tha actual action
$n or $n()	New line
$nop or $nop()	Is a "no operation". This variable gets removed.
$quot	Double quote (").
$percnt	Percent sign (%)
$dollar	Dollar sign ($)

The header and format parameters can also be used with the actionnotify script.

A default format for actions and action search results can be defined in this topic or the WebPreferences topic of the current web. See Settings for more details.

Non-standard Attributes

As well as the standard attributes you can add non-standard attributes to actions, and use them in searches. For example:

%ACTION{ who="EmperorHadrian" due="1 Jan 0053" state="closed" legion="7th" cohort="6th" maniple="3rd" }% Build a wall to keep the Scots out of England

Non-standard attributes must be lower-case words. The following names may not be used for non-standard attributes: closed, closer, created, creator, dollar, due, edit, format, header, late, n, nop, notify, percnt, quot, sort, state, text, topic, uid, web, who, within.

To define non-standard attributes you need to set the value of EXTRAS in this topic (or to the WebPreferences topic of each web) - see Settings below. All attributes must be given a type, which is used by the formatter, the search engine and the action editor. For example,

	* Set EXTRAS = |plaintiffs,names,16|decision,text,16|sentencing,date|sentence,select,"life","5 years","community service"|

The following types are supported:

Type	Format	Description
select	select, size, "option 1", "option 2", ...	Can take one of the string values option1, option2,.... etc.
names	names, size	One or more wikinames or e-mail addresses.
text	text, size	An arbitrary text field
date	date, size	A date in one of the formats described above. See Date Formats

In the above, size is a single number, which is the width (in characters) of the text box in the action editor for text, names and date, and the number of options to show in select..

Note that there is one exception to the "no redefinition" rule above; the state attribute can be extended to take extra states. However if you want the closure functionality (closed, closer, and late actions) to work, the closed state must be retained. To extend the set of states, simply include a definition of state in the EXTRAS definition:

	* Set EXTRAS = |state,select,1,"open","fried","boiled","poached","closed"|

Searching for non-standard attributes

You can of course search for values of non-standard attributes. For example:

%ACTIONSEARCH{ sentence="life" }%

If a non-standard attribute is declared as type text you can use perl regular expressions in the search. Searches for values of type names will match any-to-any. For example,

%ACTIONSEARCH{ car="VolkswagenBeetle,MercedesCoupe" }%

will match both of the following actions:

%ACTION{ car="VolkswagenBeetle,AudiSport" ... }%
%ACTION{ car="ToyotaSupra,MercedesCoupe,ColtLancer" ... }%

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ActionTrackerPlugin Settings

You can override the defaults for these values in Main.TWikiPreferences, the WebPreferences topic of the current web, or in individual topics. Use the standard TWiki 'Set' syntax e.g:

   * Set ACTIONTRACKERPLUGIN_EDITORIENT = rows

Formatting how actions are displayed

The format of an action output. The following fields can be output: web, topic, text, who, due, notify, uid, creator, state, edit, and any ACTIOPNTRACKERPLUGIN_EXTRAS you may have. These settings can be overridden in an ACTIONSEARCH command using the format and header attributes. TABLEHEADER defines the column headings, TABLEFORMAT defines the contents of the columns, and if TABLEORIENT is set to rows, action tables will be aligned as rows of values instead of the default columns of values.

• ACTIONTRACKERPLUGIN_TABLEHEADER | Assigned to | Due date | Description | State | Notify ||
• ACTIONTRACKERPLUGIN_TABLEFORMAT | $who | $due | $text $link | $state | $notify | $edit |
• ACTIONTRACKERPLUGIN_TABLEORIENT cols

The alternative text format of an action, as seen by a mail recipient who doesn't accept HTML in mail. Used when mailing action or change notifications.

• ACTIONTRACKERPLUGIN_TEXTFORMAT Action for $who, due $due, $state$n$text$n

Full URL of the CSS to use in formatting actions. This file is also called from the mail generated by the actionnotify script, so you have to use an absolute URL here, and the URL has to be visible to anyone who might receive an action notification.

• ACTIONTRACKERPLUGIN_CSS %PUBURL%/%SYSTEMWEB%/ActionTrackerPlugin/styles.css

If an action has no due date defined when it is created, then it is treated (for sorting etc) as if it was due at this time. This is a number of seconds since 1st Jan 1970, and should be 0 to sort actions that have no due date to the start of a list, or a very large number to sort them to the end.

• ACTIONTRACKERPLUGIN_DEFAULTDUE 9999999999

Formatting actions for editing

The format of the fields in the action editor.

• ACTIONTRACKERPLUGIN_EDITHEADER | Assigned to | Due date | State | Notify |
• ACTIONTRACKERPLUGIN_EDITFORMAT | $who | $due | $state | $notify |
• ACTIONTRACKERPLUGIN_EDITORIENT cols

You can also override the default EDITBOXWIDTH and EDITBOXHEIGHT settings just for the action editor:

• ACTIONTRACKERPLUGIN_EDITBOXWIDTH 70
• ACTIONTRACKERPLUGIN_EDITBOXHEIGHT 22

If you prefer the action editor to use the same browser window to edit an action, or you don't have Javascript, set this to 0. If set to 1 will edit an action in a separate browser window.

• ACTIONTRACKERPLUGIN_USENEWWINDOW 1

If you want the action editor to offer a 'Preview Changes' button, instead of the usual 'Save Changes', set this to 0. If this is set, and USENEWWINDOW is 1, the subwindow should close on save, but it won't because I haven't worked out how to do this safely in JavaScript.

• ACTIONTRACKERPLUGIN_NOPREVIEW 1

The fields to scan to detect changes for actionnotify. Changes in other fields are ignored.

• ACTIONTRACKERPLUGIN_NOTIFYCHANGES $who,$due,$state,$text

Non-standard attributes - see Non-standard attributes above.

• ACTIONTRACKERPLUGIN_EXTRAS none

If set to 1, the action tracker will show action states using a drop-down menu, to allow viewers to quickly and easily change action states. You can disable this feature by setting this to 0.

• ACTIONTRACKERPLUGIN_ENABLESTATESHORTCUT 1

Note that each state has an associated CSS class (e.g. atpStateopen) that is used to render the HTML 'select' element when ENABLESTATESHORTCUT is on. If you extend the range of states, you will need to add new CSS classes as well.

Debugging

Set to 1 to enable debug features, including the undocumented %ACTIONNOTIFICATIONS{}% and %ACTIONTRACKERPREFS% features.

• ACTIONTRACKERPLUGIN_DEBUG 0

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Plugin Installation Instructions

You do not need to install anything in the browser to use this extension. The following instructions are for the administrator who installs the extension on the server where TWiki is running.

Like many other TWiki extensions, this module is shipped with a fully automatic installer script written using the BuildContrib.

• If you have TWiki 4.1 or later, you can install from the configure interface (Go to Plugins->Find More Extensions)
  • The webserver user has to have permission to write to all areas of your installation for this to work.
• If you have a permanent connection to the internet, you are recommended to use the automatic installer script
  • Just download the ActionTrackerPlugin_installer perl script and run it.
• Notes:
  • The installer script will:
    • Automatically resolve dependencies,
    • Copy files into the right places in your local install (even if you have renamed data directories),
    • check in new versions of any installed files that have existing RCS histories files in your existing install (such as topics).
    • If the $TWIKI_PACKAGES environment variable is set to point to a directory, the installer will try to get archives from there. Otherwise it will try to download from twiki.org or cpan.org, as appropriate.
    • (Developers only: the script will look for twikiplugins/ActionTrackerPlugin/ActionTrackerPlugin.tgz before downloading from TWiki.org)
  • If you don't have a permanent connection, you can still use the automatic installer, by downloading all required TWiki archives to a local directory.
    • Point the environment variable $TWIKI_PACKAGES to this directory, and the installer script will look there first for required TWiki packages.
      • $TWIKI_PACKAGES is actually a path; you can list several directories separated by :
    • If you are behind a firewall that blocks access to CPAN, you can pre-install the required CPAN libraries, as described at http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/TWiki/HowToInstallCpanModules
• If you don't want to use the installer script, or have problems on your platform (e.g. you don't have Perl 5.8), then you can still install manually:
  1. Download and unpack one of the .zip or .tgz archives to a temporary directory.
  2. Manually copy the contents across to the relevant places in your TWiki installation.
  3. Check in any installed files that have existing ,v files in your existing install (take care not to lock the files when you check in)
  4. Manually edit LocalSite.cfg to set any configuration variables.
  5. Run configure and enable the module, if it is a plugin.
  6. Repeat from step 1 for any missing dependencies.

Note if you are installing this extension in TWiki version < 4.2, please add these definitions to your Main.WebPreferences, if they are not already there:

• Set SYSTEMWEB = %TWIKIWEB%
• Set USERSWEB = %MAINWEB%

• If the plugin is installed and enabled correctly you should see a formatted action below:

Assigned to	Due date	Description	State	Notify
TWikiGuest	Fri, 01 Jan 2010	Example action	openclosed		edit

• ... and the result of a formatted search below:

Who	TWikiGuest
Due	Fri, 01 Jan 2010
State	openclosed
Description	Example action

Plugin Info

Another great TWiki extension from the WikiRing - Working together to improve your wiki experience!

Thanks are due to the following sponsors, who have helped make this plugin possible:

• Motorola
• Wind River Systems
• Goldstar Events

Plugin Author:	TWiki:Main/CrawfordCurrie, http://c-dot.co.uk
Plugin Version:	14969 (20 Sep 2007)
Change History:
17 Sep 2007	Bugs:Item4648 $formfield wasn't working on 4.1.2
12 Sep 2007	Bugs:Item4609 fixed IE cacheing of edit screen - TWiki:Main.JoaquinBuendia
9 Sep 2007	Bugs:Item4427, Bugs:Item4591 add the ability to search for multiple states using a regular expression Bugs:Item4574 fix interaction with TinyMCEPlugin
31 Aug 2007	Bugs:Item4528 - Support $formfield in ACTIONSEARCH (same semantics as for formatted search) Bugs:Item4529 - Remove link from description of action in the $text field of format. Sponsored by Goldstar Events.
13 Aug 2007	Bugs:Item4086 - header and format parameters give more control over formatting, improved mail sent for notifications (Richard Vinke) Bugs:Item4373 - added support for TBD action dates; in the process, changed default date store format to ISO for consistency with TWiki. (Crawford Currie) Bugs:Item4374 - support AJAX-like state changes from the view screen (Crawford Currie) Bugs:Item4442 - moved preference defaults out of the plugin topic, and verified correct function (Crawford Currie, sponsored by Goldstar Events)
21 May 2007	Bugs:Item3969 - 8bit email fix (TWiki:Main.WillNorris)
12958	Bugs:Item3638 Fixed edit link for IE7
12878	putting styles.css file at the top of the html header so that skins have a chance to override the defaults; fixed generation of css classes; added aptOpen and aptClose; render actions correctly in twiki lists (TWiki:Main/MichaelDaum)
12652	Fixes for Bugs:Item3446, Bugs:Item2127. Updates to tests and templates for recent core changes.
11556	QBE topic made much friendlier using TWiki-4 features; minor bugfixes
10919	Bugs:Item2606 actionnotify can now read email addresses from password manager as well as new TWiki4 style user topics. actionnotify requires TWiki-4.0.4 + hotfix-4.0.4-1
8385	Bugs:Item1443 style sheet bug makes yellow warning not show
8372	Bugs:Item1434 moved actionnotify from bin into tools
8304	Bugs:Item1305 removing dotted style from AT. Looks horrible in IE
8090	Bugs:Item1304 removed unnecessary warning that may be breaking some sites
8089	Bugs:Item1305 changed dotted to solid gray, as requested
26 Mar 2005	2.022 Corrected JSCalendar problems, and cleaned up lazy-loading of libraries. Added relative date specs to searches.
8 Feb 2005	2.021 Documentation fixes.
19 Nov 2004	2.020 Added conditions for date matching, and fixed config so that tests pass again.
13 Oct 2004	2.013 If a user cuts and pastes an action with a uid in it, the action editor would get confused. This update ensures all action UIDs are unique within a topic when it is saved.
16 Aug 2004	2.012 Dependency automation and Cairo readiness, further change to within behaviour (bidirectionality)
3 Feb 2004	Fixes for internationalisation, name matching, QBE, within= behaviour, documentation.
21 May 2003	Non-standard fields. Configurability of tables and action editor. Non-standard attributes. Eliminated chdir. Multi-line actions. Optimisation of notifies.
30 Apr 2003	Version 2.0; Large sections rewritten to take advantage of improvements in Plugin support, eliminating two scripts in bin. Added UIDs and formattable action searches
30 Jan 2003	Query-by-example action search with notify field; notification of change emails and actions email are sent as one; notify field was added to topic view and edit; various bug fixes by TWiki:Main/PaulineCheung
26 Sep 2002	Added changedsince notify support, added support for editing in a seperate window, incorporated attribute syntax corrections contributed by PeterThoeny? , sorted ACTIONSEARCH output and action notifications
14 Feb 2002	Sorted ACTIONSEARCH results by due date; Fixed bugs editaction kills form data, Actions flagged as late the day before, TWiki table and bullet formatting doesn't work within action text
11 Jan 2002	Added ACTIONSEARCH for selected webs and topics; Changed action editor to use a template; Eliminated UNIX dependencies; Fixed formatting of actions in bulleted lists
9 Jan 2002	Bugfix version
Dependencies:	Name Version Description Time::ParseDate >=2003.0211 Required. Available from the CPAN:Time::ParseDate archive. TWiki::Plugins >=1.1 TWiki 4 TWiki::Contrib::JSCalendarContrib >=0.961 Optional, used if installed. Used to display a neat calendar popup when editing actions. Available from the TWiki:Plugins/JSCalendarContrib repository.
Plugin Home:	http://TWiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Plugins/ActionTrackerPlugin
Feedback:	http://TWiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Plugins/ActionTrackerPluginDev

Related Topics: TWikiPreferences, TWikiPlugins

Further development

Further development of this code is welcomed. It is recommended that you unpack the distribution into a development directory and use the supplied build file which provides targets to run the test suite, and install and uninstall your development code into a test installation. Please, please, please run, and extend if necessary, the test set!

Developer discussion is in TWiki:Plugins/ActionTrackerPluginDev.

Copyright

This code is an original development of Motorola Inc. and is protected by the following copyrights:

• Copyright © 2002-2003 Motorola. All Rights Reserved.
• Portions Copyright © 2004-2007 Crawford Currie, http://c-dot.co.uk

License

As required for the publication of all extensions to TWiki, this software is published under the terms of the GNU General Public License.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details, published at http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html