Allow to clear the database

[Ekleog]

I am currently trying out ActivityDiary, and a sinequanone condition for using it is being able to nicely export data to a computer. (Ideally there'd be a nice synchronization between the two, but even something manual would work for me)

There is already the “export database” option, that will likely allow me to handle this. However, I can't find a way to clear the activities logged in the diary, so that I avoid importing twice the same activity on the computer.

What do you think about such a feature, that would clear the diary while hopefully keeping the learned habits of activities?

Anyway, thank you for your work!

[ramack]

First of all welcome here and thanks for the feedback.

The export database actually is exporting the complete "internal" sqlite file. The main use case is backup / restore. For sure you can still read the file from a PC using the sqlite library from an own program or for example the Sqlite Brower or potentially there is even some spreadsheet-import plugin for your office suite.

Clearing the database could be a feature to add, but in this case we would also through away the learned habits, because that is (at least so far) all derived from the database content on the fly. A way to just hide some entries on export is in my eyes not very interesting, so I would highly recommend to do this on the using side of the data. There are two easy ways: Every entry in the diary has a start (end end) timestamp (including date for sure), so you can on the next import just consider entries newer than the last import, or you can rely on the IDs, because every entry as a unique ID, which is incremented and not reused, so you can just import the entries with IDs higher than the latest you already have.

That said, I'd like to reference #3 which shows, that multi-device support, even including web and therefore also desktop support is intended right from the beginning of the app development. So if you have ideas, suggestions or even time to do some development resources I'd be happy if you'd contribute there even if it is just to guide it into the right direction and put some priority on it...

[Ekleog]

Yes, I was planning to basically extract information from the DB using eg. python's sqlite3 module, even though it's not really designed to 😇

I think #3 would be great indeed! Unfortunately, I won't have time to help much with development for a while… sorry!