sort by date?
 

Hi there,
I am an enthusiastic user of Ultrarecall, after trying several other PIMs. I use it to back up and index my emails from Thunderbird, but I do not manage to order them according to the Item Attribute "Message date" in the tree view.
Is there any possibility to have a tree view ordered/filtered according one or several Item Attributes? I think something in the style of MyInfo PIM .... It would be a valuable improvement, in the case it is not already there


On a different line, some time ago in the forum it was mentioned about a future SDK kit or scripting possibilities for Ultrarecall. Any progress in this direction? I would love to be able to access for instance in Lua the database and process some items...
Cheerio,
Edmond

Re: sort by date?
 

Edmond, isn't all this possible by sorting on attributes in child pane rather than in the tree pane? I think it would give you more latitude because you could then on a single click, sort by title or date or any other parsed info. But then, I'm a realtively new URp user, so I may not have this right.

sort by date - child pane
 

Hi Janrif,
You are right, the Child Items panel is the solution I use for the moment; it is flexible enough to allow sorting according to any chosen field. This is why I thought that the field-based sorting mechanism is already in place, and might be present as well at tree-view level. When you have different mail folders, like I do, I would prefer to have a general view of all emails sorted by date, directly visible at tree level for all mail folders.

Thanks for the reply. It's good to know there is a helpful (growing) community out there...
Edmond

I was thinking similarly to Janif-
Create a Saved Search Item to get the mail and setup the Saved Search Item's Child pane to display the fields in the order you desire.

I created several of these Saved Searches to create multiple views of the data (by sender-by date, by subject-by date, by date, etc).

I don't know of a way to order the Data Explorer pane as you desire.

Re: sort by date - child pane
 

I don't know how you have your email outline set up but, let's say it's by the month, i.e. all emails from Jan, Feb, etc.
You can rename those folders in the tree w dates, i.e. 0107, 0207, 0307 & then sort that branch.

Otherwise I don't know what UR would sort on unless you could add columns to the tree view so you could parse creation date, etc to columns then sort on that. The only programs that I know that can do that is zoot

Zoot is being converted to 32 bit & doesn't have RTF or other bells & whistles but is an amazing data gathering program.

ADM comes close but I can't recommend ADM (although I am a user) because the developers are now in China & not talking to the rest of the world, i.e. no road map, no tech support, etc but the last version they put out was quite talented.

OTOH, I've found Kyle is very inventive & UR is quite talented...in sometimes not such obvious ways so there may be another method so it may be possible & I just don't know how to do it.

And not to be disrespectful to Kyle & UR, but MyInfo allows user to create columns connected to the tree. You might look @ that product by Milenix. Also check out the roadmap.

Date sorting of strings only works when you use a format like
YYMMDD e.g. 070227 or YYYY.MM.DD e.g. 2007.02.27 . This is not so easy to read ;-) but works.

I use UR to track my customer data base and my activities, means my call notes. So I have a folder for call notes and create new ones with Alt-Z. Works great, but since UR takes the standard date format of the OS, I had to change that since it differs from the local date format here in Germany.
No I can hardly read my explorer any more.
I would need a format date string, but Options->Misc allows you only to choose Date or Time or both.
I asked Kyle already for that, but had no success til now ;-).

UR's reliance on system settings is a PITA as far as I am concerned.

It means no flexibility with setting dates, if you want one format for the system, and one or more for various parts of the UR database.

It also means no freedom to set typeface or size in the tree, apart from the size setting allowed by the system. I would prefer a larger type size in the tree, but not for my system.

I'd like to know what the reasoning is behind this reliance on system settings.

Thanks.

Daly

Re: sort by date?
 

It's on the list for a future release. For now, the UR way to do this would be to create a custom Advanced search item (in the Search or Data Explorer pane) to find all messages (limited to a particular branch and filtered on date range or other attributes if desired), and then customize the columns and sorting in the Search Results pane. You can also include Lineage and/or Parent Title in the column layout (to include some tree information) if it would be useful.

Quote:

On a different line, some time ago in the forum it was mentioned about a future SDK kit or scripting possibilities for Ultrarecall. Any progress in this direction? I would love to be able to access for instance in Lua the database and process some items...

Some sort of programmatic access to the DB is on the list, but no ETA at this time for when we might get to it.

Why not uncheck 'Tools | Options | Trees | Alphabetically sort when adding children to new items', then insert (into a node without children or in an existing sorted node after moving an item up/down) will automatically be in chronological order, and the Date Created attribute will hold the actual creation time?

And your request is on our list (if not in v3.0, probably 3.1).

1) Many Windows users expect consistency between their applications, and following the user's Windows preferences provides that. I suspect a lot of users would be unhappy and confused if we ignored those settings and picked our own defaults.
2) There haven't been very many requests for allowing customization from the user's Windows settings.

We could provide the ability to override the defaults, but this can get complex very quickly, depending on how much needs to be customizable. If it is only allowing customization of the Tree pane font/size and the Alt+Z date/time format, that is not too difficult (and these are on the list), but you seem to be implying that every place a date, time, or date+time could be displayed or edited in UR, the format should be customizable (separately for each location?), which would be a lot more work. Making the font individually customizable for each pane also gets tedious.

Thank you all for the advice.
For the time being I shall stick with the saved advanced search procedure, and wait for the improvements in the next versions. I must recognize I use Ultrarecall more and more, and this is why I was asking as well about an open programming interface for scripting. As for archiving my emails, ideal for me is not to have a tree of displayed dates (like Ortwin), but rather to have the subject (or any other attribute) displayed and the sorting to be according to message date (or other attribute). I use Thunderbird Portable as email client, and regularly backup my mail boxes in UR format.


Best regards,
Edmond

Re: Re: sort by date?
 

What about this suggestion (sorry if it was already mentioned somewhere)?
We try to do a workaround for Ortwin's problem, because the item is by default a string, and to represent his item, he doesnt need string data, but date. The question is, why he should use string to describe his items, if he needs date?
In general, what is now "Item Title" should be any recognizable attribute, and if this is an ordered set, then the sorting will be provided. Just like in databases, there is one primary key per table, and it certainly can be sth else than just string.
So on top of "Item Title", I suggest another system attribute:
"Item Attribute" - date, number, string, or any defined attribute (apart from system reserved).
What do you think?

Nice idea, I support that.

In my databases I always have a short (6 characters) indexed special field for fast search and access.
In a company datatable this is the common name by which everbody knows (and calls) a company - not the official name.
In customer tables its the common name or a nickname. It can be used to group subgroups (headquarter, subs) and so on.

PS: Aren't we here off topic with all our suggestions?