Parent / child roll-up¶
When your tasks have a parent relationship (mapped via Settings → Fields → Parent Property), subtasks nest under their parent in the grid. This page covers the behaviors that surprise people most.
Subtasks nest under their parent¶
The parent's own bar shows its own scheduled / due dates — like any other
task, not an auto-computed summary of its children. So a child can extend
beyond the parent's bar until you choose to update the parent's dates (see
below).
Collapse and expand¶
Each parent row has a chevron (▸ / ▾) to the left of its name in the grid:
- Click the chevron to hide or show that parent's children.
- To collapse or expand the whole tree at once, use the Collapse all / Expand all button in the chart's bottom-right button stack.
Collapse state is per-session and isn't saved to the Base. See Chart controls → Collapse & expand.
Dragging a parent moves the whole subtree¶
Drag a parent bar and all of its descendants move with it, keeping their relative positions. This is deliberate: rescheduling a phase should move everything in that phase together.
📷 Demo image pending
A GIF of dragging a parent and watching its subtree follow will be added in a later documentation pass.
A child's dates can reshape its parent¶
When you move or resize a child so it extends past the parent's own dates, the parent can grow to contain it — but only if you let it. What happens is controlled by one setting:
- Ask before updating parent dates (default) — you get a confirmation before the parent's dates change.
- Update parent dates automatically — the parent grows silently to fit.
- Never update parent dates — the parent's dates are left alone even if a child extends beyond them.
Consequence
With Never, a child can visually extend past its parent's bar and the parent's stored dates won't change. With Automatically, editing a child can rewrite the parent note's dates without a prompt. Pick the mode that matches how much you want child edits to touch parent notes.
Companion vs. standalone¶
Roll-up works in both modes, but the hierarchy comes from a different source
in each. In companion mode nesting follows TaskNotes' own projects
(subtasks) relationships — the Parent Property
is ignored. In standalone mode there are no TaskNotes relationships, so the
Parent Property is the hierarchy: map it, or there's no roll-up. Date
write-back (and therefore the cascade above) only applies in companion mode;
standalone is read-only.
Expanded relationships (companion)¶
In companion mode the Gantt can pull in related tasks that fall outside your Base's filter — a subtask of something you're viewing that the filter didn't match — and draw them as faded context rows so the full structure is visible. How prominent those rows are, and whether top-level subtasks are hidden, is controlled in Settings → Relationships.