Group Children by Attribute in Data Explorer

[xja]

This suggestion basically proposes a way to apply the Outlook concept of Grouping to a set of siblings in the Data Explorer.

Provide an option when right-clicking on an item (let's call that item "Parent Item") in the Data Explorer view that says "Group children by attribute(s)...". When this option is selected, the user is prompted to select an Attribute.

Upon selecting an attribute, the next level down on the tree from the Parent Item is changed such that it does not contain its children but rather one item for each unique value found in the Attribute field of all the Parent Item's children. Let's call these items "Attribute Items." Then each of these "Attribute Items" would have as its children, those children items of the Parent Item which match the corresponding Attribute value.

Then you could do the same recursively for any Attribute Item... ie, choose to Group its "children" (really the children of the Parent Item which have the matching Attribute value) by another Attribute.

Example: Let's say the Parent Item is Tasks with several individual Tasks as its children. Each child Task has a Status attribute (list values: Current, Completed) and a Category attribute (list values: Personal, Business). You select the Tasks Parent Item and choose to group its children by the Status attribute. Then linked to the Tasks Parent Item, the tree now shows 2 "Attribute items," titled "Current" and "Completed" with some tasks linked to "Current" and other tasks linked to "Completed." You could then select one or both of those Attribute Items and choose to group them by Category. Then, linked to "Current" are 2 Attribute items, "Personal" and "Business." If you had selected the "Completed" item when choosing to Group Children, then there would also be "Personal" and "Business" Attribute items linked to it. Now the individual Task items are all linked to the corresponding branch based on both their matching Attribute values for Status AND Category. If you drag a Task item onto an Attribute item, rather than linking, its Attribute value(s) are changed to whatever values they would need to be to appear in that branch.

This is very useful when you have a matrix relationship among items. I realize you could manually create these branches with "Status" info items and "Category" info items and link each Task item under the corresponding branch rather than using Attributes, but you would then have redundant definitions of Status and Categories, and you wouldn't be able to search based on Status or Category. Using Attributes is just better for some things but you still want to be able search and organize by them.


I know that this could get confusing to some but it would be nice to have as an option.