yaTimer now helps you avoid blank reports

Every once in a while I get a support e-mail telling me yaTimer started producing empty reports – and in every single case the problem was an incorrect setting in the reports window, usually setting the project, client and/or color filters to a combination that just doesn’t have any matching tasks.

This is not the fault of the customer who sent the support e-mail – this is a design failure of the yaTimer report filtering user interface that makes it easy to choose a filter that will result in an empty report (in my defense, this is a design failure shared with just about any other software in the world – but it doesn't make it any less of a failure).

So, in the latest version of yaTimer (2.7) I’ve set out to fix this, now when you create a report in yaTimer it will first check if the filter you’ve set will result in an empty report and will show a warning – and even better, yaTimer will try to guess (based on the data it has) what is the specific filter you’ve set by mistake and tell you right there what to do about it, here are some examples:

In the first example I’ve set the time range to “Today” but I haven't logged any time today:

In the second example I’ve set the time range to 2011 (entire year) and “accidentally” also set the project to “(None)”, yaTimer doesn’t only warn me the report is blank it actually knows the filter that causes it to be black in the project filter and not the time range filter:

Hopefully this will solve the frustration of creating a report and getting a page with only headers and footers.