Tasks across integrations (CalDAV, TODO apps, etc.)

Feature Requests
1

:link: Related GitHub discussion in home-assistant/architecture.

Summary: do you think we need support for tasks/TODOs in the core?

Probably modeled after the calendar integration which is a base that provides shared types and interfaces for other integrations like the local calendar, CalDAV, Google Calendar and others.

Existing integrations that could build upon this:

  • CalDAV — because the underlying protocol can retrieve tasks as well as events, but the current HA integration doesn’t do this. Notably, caldav client, that Home Assistant uses under the hood, seems to support tasks already.
  • Shopping List might become the tasks’ counterpart of calendar’s Local Calendar. There’s been at least one person who didn’t find this integration despite it fitting their use case. I’m not sure a rename should necessarily be in order though — might just lead to the same problem from the other side.
  • Remember the Milk seems to operate in tasks already and includes a few exclusive services that, other than using a specific service for persistence, aren’t unique to the service.
  • Todoist seems to be in the similar vein thematically, but this is where I start guessing, since I don’t actually use it and thus I’m not entirely sure what the workflows with the existing integration look like.
  • I don’t think it’s currently present, but Grocy’s chores would be a terrific fit.

My own use case is largely Nextcloud Deck that I find great for tracking household and family chores, especially with the ability to share a task with other people on the server and a comfy mobile app. And when Nextcloud introduced integration between Tasks and Calendar (back in 2020 + some time as updates were rolling out) I found Nextcloud’s calendar to be a great dashboard item to glance at every once in a while.

In theory, a read-only view of CalDAV tasks would scratch my itch nicely, meaning I could just remove the “events only” filter from the integration and skip tasks without due dates.

Another bit I use reasonably often on my phone is a list of overdue tasks. I’m thinking of building an automation that will announce an item from that list when a certain motion sensor is tripped near the voice assistant (shameless Year of the Voice plug :grin:), but that I can already do outside of HA using NodeRED and Rhasspy, both of which I already run. But hey, maybe someone wants to do that using HA alone.

I also saw a request for Any.do support here on the forum.

After looking at the surroundings and seeing that there might be more demand for this than just my use case, I decided to bring this up for discussion in the community.

  • Do you have other ideas for how you would use it?
  • Development-wise, what major steps have to happen for this to come true?
  • Is this entirely unnecessary scope creep and the same needs can be covered much easier?
  • And just in general, what do you think of this?
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This should get possible with the new ToDo List Entity, although there is no support for CalDAV Calendars yet - that would be great!

2 Likes
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The new Todo Lists really feel rudimentary, they are as basic as they can be. With a caldav sync we could at least sync the lists to other platforms like nextcloud tasks, which would open a lot more possibilities.

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It is an important first step that was not yet done back when I wrote this FR.

Nextcloud Tasks features a lot of fields not present on this new entity type, like parent task (for subtasks), priority, due date, progress, etc. — but none of them seem critical, at least for basic usage, so basic dependencies for development of CalDAV vTODO sync now seem to be met!

1 Like
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I think we can now mark this as “pretty much completed”:

Thanks to everyone who made it happen! You rock!