Open Source - Working on Task Migration for Nested Checkboxes

Issue: Task Migration Bug for Nested Checkboxes

This week, I worked on Issue #3 in the project. The issue identified a bug where only the first checkbox in a nested list was being migrated to the current day’s task page, leaving subsequent checkboxes behind. The goal was to ensure all nested checkboxes in a task list were correctly transferred to the new page, preserving the nested structure.

Preparation for the Fix

To address this bug, I set up the project environment and familiarized myself with the repository structure. This involved:

Reviewing the existing task migration function to understand the current behavior.
Ensuring my setup could handle the required API calls.
Reviewing documentation on nested lists and task migrations to understand how other tools approach similar issues.

Learning Goals and Key Knowledge Gained

To implement this fix, I needed to understand how nested tasks are structured and accessed in the Notion API. This led me to learn more about recursive functions in JavaScript, which allow a function to call itself until a specified condition is met—in this case, iterating through nested tasks until each was processed.

Code Explanation

To address the issue, I implemented a recursive function, moveNestedTasks, which handles nested checkboxes by:

Identifying Incomplete Tasks: Filtering tasks to locate those that were not checked.
Migrating the Main Tasks: Adding these tasks to the current day’s task page.
Recursively Handling Nested Tasks: For any task that had children, moveNestedTasks calls itself to handle the nested items, ensuring that the sub-tasks are also appended in the correct format.

Here’s a simplified code breakdown:

Main Migration Function: moveIncompleteTasks retrieves incomplete tasks and calls moveNestedTasks.
Recursive Function: moveNestedTasks iterates through tasks and, if it encounters a nested task, calls itself again, ensuring each level of the nested list is correctly processed.

Research and Challenges

During this work, I researched task structures within the Notion API and reviewed best practices for recursive functions in JavaScript. The biggest challenge was ensuring each subtask maintained its order and structure when migrated, which required careful handling of API calls.

Project Maintainer Interaction

The project maintainer was responsive and supportive, especially when I requested clarification on nested structures. They confirmed the exact requirements for migrating nested items, which helped me finalize the approach.

Difficulties and Solutions

I initially struggled with managing the nested structure while ensuring efficiency. Recursive functions, while effective, can lead to high memory usage if not handled correctly. By carefully structuring the function calls and ensuring each nested task was processed independently, I was able to overcome these challenges.

Reflection

This task was a great learning experience in working with recursive functions and handling nested data structures through APIs. If I were to approach this again, I’d test each nested level independently before the final implementation to verify structure handling at each depth. Going forward, I’ll continue using recursive functions for similar tasks, given how well it handled nested structures in this case.