Setting the category while creating tasks

Created by: naddeoa

Is there anyway to set the category when you start tracking? I find that I always need to open the full hamster application so I can tag it with a category. I did notice that the shell extension displays the category as a #hashtag value, but if I type a hashtag myself when creating a task it doesn't translate that to a category in the hamster application.

Created by: a-m-s

The format is: activity@category, description #tag

You appear to have confused the category with the tags. I believe the comma is necessary before the tags, even if you don't want to give a description.

Created by: naddeoa

I did a test just now, entering description #tag into the task field. When I open the overview mode, it doesn't show up like a tag is supposed to. It only shows up as part of the description of the activity. In the screenshot, the top activity is the one I made through by typing description #tag and the bottom one was made without any tag, but the tag was added through the actual hamster application. They should be showing up as little tags so I can filter by them in the totals page.

Created by: a-m-s

I just entered the text I posted into the extension verbatim, and the hamster application shows this.

Created by: a-m-s

Did you omit the activity@category part? That's not optional.

Created by: naddeoa

yes, I was leaving out the @category. It looks like there was an implicit @Unsorted added in Hamster when I did that. I guess I can just add categories to everything, but that wasn't a clear requirement from the UI. Perhaps placeholder text would go a long way here?

Created by: a-m-s

If I enter activity, description #tag, I get this:

It is indeed in the "Unsorted" category. If you create a category for "activity" (and it's not ambiguous) then it'll autocomplete, so you don't need to always type it.

Created by: naddeoa

I just looked over your original message and noticed that the comma is actually mandatory. I think I can get along with this now, thanks a lot for answering my questions!

Created by: elbenfreund

Thanks for adressing this @a-m-s :) I take it this issue may be closed then? The general lack of documentation is covered by #158 (closed)

Created by: naddeoa

This is closed, I'm sorry!

Created by: elbenfreund

Don't be, its fine. Thanks for raising the issue

Created by: elbenfreund

Btw: @naddeoa I noticed you seem to be interested in bringing hamster to the web. Maybe you would be interested in working with us creating a (most likely flask based) RestAPI interface to the new hamster package?

Created by: naddeoa

Actually, I would. I was doing some prototyping with a REST API that I hacked together with express, but it proxies through dbus, which has some obvious issues. What is the "new hamster package"? I've only recently discovered Hamster and I've used it primarily though the GTK/Gnome shell extension.

Created by: elbenfreund

The main functionality with regards to the rewrite is found in the hamster-lib repository/package whilst hamster-gtk provides a refactored GTK3 based gui inspired by the latest legacy hamster branch.

Today I hacked up some very quick and dirty example / proof of concept code for what I imagine to be our main universal rest api interface, please see the hamster-flask-api (not to be mistaken by the very old flask-experiment repository). Using flask it should be very simple to expose our existing and relativly well documented API (see hamster_lib.storage for details) to http/https requests.

Hope this gives you a rough idea about where we are heading and if this is of interest for you...

Have a great evening, Eric.

Created by: naddeoa

Is the goal to have the same machine that hosts the API also store the data, then write clients against it? And is there any discussion forum/slack channels or anything where those kinds of questions are being asked?

Created by: elbenfreund

Due to our new compartmentalized code it really is up to the user whether the ani server runs on the same machine as the storage solution. You could do so using swlite or a local db, but you might as well connect to a a remote PostgreSQL server instead. One way or the other clients would not have to care as they interact just with the ani server. Please have a look at http://projecthamster.org/pages/get-in-touch.html and feel encouraged to continue this discussion via the mailing list. Please note that the IRC channel can take some time till a response emerges..

Created by: naddeoa

Thanks a lot! I'll look as soon as I can. All of my hamster data is stuck on my laptop atm, so I'm interested in splitting that part out for sure.

Created by: elbenfreund

Being able to have multiple clients for one datastore was one of the major starting points for the rewrite, so this is something we are working towards to. There are two main solutions to this:

• we provide a full fledged SQLAlchemy based backend, which supports (remote) databases. So python clients can just use this and be done
• for mobile and web clients we hope to be able to provide a restful API that they can interact with remotely