Recurring reminders

[kai11]

Remind about something each day, each wednesday, each 15th, etc... This can be part of upcomming templates - when template generate remidner on its own, without my clicks.

[felixwiemuth]

Recurring reminders are definitely a planned feature!

It doesn't really have to do anything with templates which are just preconfigurations to create reminders, so everything you can do there you should also be able to do when just creating a reminder directly. Instead, reminders will have a new property: recurrence patterns.

Aspects to be considered for a design

• Which recurrence patterns should be supported and how should the UI allow to specify them?
  • Orgmode has a complex textual recurrence specification format, this could be considered
  • "Static recurrence patterns": all occurrences fully specified at time of creation of the reminder
  • "Dynamic recurrence patterns": next occurrence determined at time of dismissing the current one (e.g. next 10am, in 2 hours)
• How should recurring reminders be displayed in the reminders list?
  • A "recurrence" symbol plus a textual representation of the recurrence pattern?
  • Should there be separate entries for occurrences other than the next?
• Should the notification of a recurring reminder look different? Have different actions (like stop recurrence)?

[kai11]

Minimal Viable Product for this feature will be:

• static recurrence patterns only (easier to do and to explain / design ui)
• each X days and each X hours is enough for 95% cases
• recurring icon + next time of firing in ui
• no need to add anything extra to notification itself

I think this will be enough. More complex stuff (orgmode, etc...) may easily cause feature creep.

[jerryn70]

Will this feature contain the option add weekly monthly yearly and custom (28 days) reminders ? And option to start reminding before partucular days example 5 days before 7 days before etc

[felixwiemuth]

I think the recurrence mechanism will support multiple different recurrence specification formats, where there first will only be very basic ones and then new ones can be added later.

A first simple recurrence format could be "repeat every x minutes/hours/days". This also allows to realize "Every Tuesday" (where in the first version you will have to select a Tuesday date and then "repeat every 7 days").

Note that "every month" is more complex, because it has to be specified more precisely what this means (e.g. every 30 days, or every 1st of a month etc.).

In the first version it probably won't be possible to specify when to stop (e.g. after n occurrences or after a specific date), but this can be added later. Instead, for now one would have to edit the reminder and remove recurrence.

Regarding reminding (also multiple times) before the set date: This is actually a different feature I have been thinking of, see #21.

[tiritibambix]

This is the next feature we need :)

[VaultDeveloper]

No commit since 8 monthes. Is this repo dead and this feature will never happen ?

[tiritibambix]

No commit since 8 monthes. Is this repo dead and this feature will never happen ?

I'd love to know too ! :)

[maitra]

Any chance even the simple version can be done soon. The Reminder app is not all that useful otherwise.

[felixwiemuth]

@VaultDeveloper @tiritibambix @maitra: I can understand that you would like to have this feature soon, and so would I. I also appreciate that you are interested in the app. But either you have to be patient, contribute yourself, or you find someone who can contribute to speed this up.

@VaultDeveloper Please take a look at releases and other issues before making assumptions about the project's activity.

One thing to be decided and designed for this feature is the UI to choose a recurrence pattern (for the described simple version, but also for a later version which allows for more choices). The difficult part here is to have the controls available at a convenient place in the Add Reminder dialog while not using too much space. I will add a general issue about placing and designing all the controls for the different reminder settings, and the controls for recurrence will probably eventually be part of a more uniform UI design resulting from this.

It might be worth however to use a simple temporary UI design for this feature until a more sophisticated design is in place. I could imagine placing the extra controls at the end of the dialog, reached by scrolling if there is not enough space on the screen. There would be a switch to enable/disable recurrence and a number picker and a unit drop down with minutes/hours/days to select the interval.

For now, #30 is a priority though, as I first would like to get that UI into place. You are welcome to help.

[maitra]

@VaultDeveloper @tiritibambix @maitra: I can understand that you would like to have this feature soon, and so would I. I also appreciate that you are interested in the app. But either you have to be patient, contribute yourself, or you find someone who can contribute to speed this up.

No problem, understood. I simply decided to move on and use Tasks which is on F-Droid and even the free version has the features I need. Thank you for your work and good luck!