Recurrence

Recurrence is used to create periodical tasks, such as paying the rent or mowing the lawn.

There are two types of recurrence:

• Recurring: Task which needs to be done every specified period of time, like day, week, etc. It doesn't matter when you complete the task, the next one will be created based on the original due date.
• Repeating: When this task gets completed or deleted, a duplicate will be created with the specified time offset from the closing date. I.e. subsequent tasks get delayed (e.g. mowing the lawn).

pydo implements recurrence with the creation of two kind of tasks: parent and children. The first one holds the template for the second. Each time a child is completed or deleted, the parent attributes are copied and the due date is set according to the recurrence type.

pydo will only maintain one children per parent, so it won't create new tasks until the existent is either completed or deleted. Furthermore, it will create only the next actionable task. So if from the last completed children you've missed 3 tasks, those won't be created.

Create a recurring or repeating task.¶

To create a recurrent or repeating task, the recurrence time must be set under the rec or rep attribute. That attribute must match the pytho date format.

$: pydo add Pay the rent due:2021-11-01 rec:1mo
  [+] Added recurring task 0: Pay the rent
  [+] Added first child task with id 1

$: pydo add Mow the lawn due:today rep:20d
  [+] Added repeating task 1: Mow the lawn
  [+] Added first child task with id 2

Once they are created, the children will show in the open report, but not the parent.

$: pydo
     ╷              ╷                  ╷
  ID │ Description  │ Due              │ Parent
╺━━━━┿━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┿━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┿━━━━━━━━╸
  1  │ Pay the rent │ 2021-11-01 00:00 │ 0
  2  │ Mow the lawn │ 2021-10-07 13:38 │ 1
     ╵              ╵                  ╵

The recurrent and repeating parents can be seen with the recurring report.

$: pydo recurring

     ╷              ╷       ╷           ╷
  ID │ Description  │ Recur │ RecurType │ Due
╺━━━━┿━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┿━━━━━━━┿━━━━━━━━━━━┿━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━╸
  0  │ Pay the rent │ 1mo   │ Recurring │ 2021-11-01 00:00
  1  │ Mow the lawn │ 20d   │ Repeating │ 2021-10-07 13:38
     ╵              ╵       ╵           ╵

Completing or deleting a repeating task¶

If you complete or delete the children of a recurrent or repeating task, the next child will be spawned. But if you wish to delete or complete the parent so no further children gets created, you can do either by calling do or rm with the parent task id, or with the --parent flag with the child id. The advantage of the second method is that you don't need to know the parent id, and it will close both parent and children.

$: pydo rm --parent 1
  [+] Closed child task 1: Pay the rent with state deleted
  [+] Closed parent task 0: Pay the rent with state deleted

$: pydo
     ╷              ╷                  ╷
  ID │ Description  │ Due              │ Parent
╺━━━━┿━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┿━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┿━━━━━━━━╸
  2  │ Mow the lawn │ 2021-10-07 13:43 │ 1
     ╵              ╵                  ╵

Modifying a recurring task¶

If changes are made in a child task, those changes wont be propagated to the following children, if you want to make changes permanent, you need to change the parent either using the parent task id or using mod --parent with the children id.

Freeze a parent task¶

If you need to temporary pause the creation of new children you can freeze the parent task either with it's id or with freeze --parent using the children id. Frozen tasks will appear in the frozen report.

To resume the children creation use the thaw command.

$: pydo freeze 2 --parent
  [+] Frozen recurrent task 1: Mow the lawn and deleted it's last child 2

$: pydo thaw 1
  [+] Thawed task 1: Mow the lawn, and created it's next child task with id 3