Date ranges: search syntax for start vs end dates?

Ok (1) When did date ranges happen and how did I miss that???

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This is really awesome (thanks!) and I don’t want to be the guy who just asks for more, but this is so close to having searchable start / end dates that I wonder if it’s worth doing. In this date range, does Dynalist distinguish between the ‘start’ date and the ‘end’ date in its code? If so, it would be so amazing to be able to search saparately for e.g. projects which start within the next week vs those which end i.e. deadlines. This is a really important distinction in project management and the ability to do this would be sweeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeet

Thanks for all your ongoing hard work guys,

Stephen

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We’re going to announce it in the monthly update tomorrow, but it got released together with the checkbox revamp.

Currently, when you search for date, it will return all date ranges that overlap with what you specify. Did you mean you wanted to treat start time and end time as points in time rather than ranges and search for them?

Hi Erica,

Thanks for replying, what I mean is: imagine we have two projects, one starting Tuesday and one with a deadline Tuesday. It would be nice to be able to run an end:1w search to get an idea of your deadlines for the next week ( project 2)without having projects that only start that week (project 1) polluting your search. However I get how date ranges work now, so the item with a date range effectively just has multiple dates attached, one for each day in the range, so what I’m asking for would be a completely new feature and more work your end than I was expecting (instead of, if dynalist already distinguished between start and end dates and all you had to do was add search syntax)

Edit : “Did you mean you wanted to treat start time and end time as points in time rather than ranges and search for them?” Yes exactly!

One day maybe :slight_smile:

Stephen

Ok I just thought of a workaround for this now that we have in : note and in : title searches

It only works if you have the system of putting e.g. start dates in the note section and end dates in the title section of the bullet

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Nice workaround!

I think the original feature request is a good call. Let’s see if more people are interested in this (I see @HTHawks is!) :slight_smile:

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Right now it seems that tasks whose start dates have passed are treated as “overdue” in terms of the highlighting. I would like these to be a different color, since they are “in process” not yet overdue. And if there is a way to sort by due date (is there?) it would be good to use the end date, not the start date. I don’t know if I need search or not though … need to think about it.

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Ooh yes an ‘in progress’ colour would be nice. I think that would need dynalist to make the same distinction between start and end dates that I want :slight_smile:

I really want this to work, since it’s already in place, but it won’t for me because I would have a start date in the note and the deadline in the title, but a date search won’t differentiate and will just hit on either one.

Example:
Project X deadline: !(two weeks from now)
Start date: !(last Thursday)

Searching “in:title 2021 until:7d” ideally would not hit on Project X (because the deadline’s two weeks out), but it does because of the start date in the note.
One sure way I can make it work with DL’s date search is to put the dates in separate bullets, but that’s a little clunky.

I think I should explain what I mean by “start date,” since it may differ from others’ conception. A better name might be “snooze date.” Suppose I need to schedule an eye appointment a year from now, but it’s way too early to know what I might need to schedule around, etc. So I set a start date 10 months from now, meaning I can forget about it until then. Some GTD apps will push an item onto a “focus list” when the start date rolls around, bringing it to your attention. In Dynalist, I’d set up a search for “#active OR start-date:<before now [forget the syntax]>”, thus effectively activating the item in question. So to me it’s not really about looking at a date range from start date to deadline. Note that deadline terminology doesn’t apply here. “Overdue” becomes “active”, etc.

I think “until” is not what you’re after?
“until” is ANY date before the specified time
“within” is X-time surrounding the specified time

OR
use Since with Until, like…
since:9m until:11m

Sorry, I couldn’t quite wrap my head around your explanation. I hope this helps.

@Moi_Oci

Make Appointment range will be 10 months to 12 months.
After 10 months any search like within:1w should include “Make Appointment” and you will see the range. You have your words you prefer to use, but it seems to me Range still serves you.