Attributes: Data Type, Cardinality

[dspeers]

I'm a new UR user, and so far I'm quite happy with it. I've long looked for a tool like this, tried various tools that I've only been partially satisfied with, and this is the first tool that looks like it will really live up to the promise. That said, I do of course have some suggestions...

One of the things I'm doing is assigning names to projects. I import a link to a contact out of MS Outlook underneath the Contacts branch, and I can alt-drag this contact into whatever project or sub-project that person is responsible for. But from a knowledge-management point-of-view, this isn't really the correct way to represent this relationship. A child of a project should be a sub-project (a kind of project), not a person. For example, when I'm looking a project and its sub-projects, the "child items" pane shows all the subprojects and their associated attributes (start date, end date, status, priority, and so on), and then you also see the contact(c) assigned to the project, with none of these attributes filled in (because they don't apply).

It would make more sense if I could set an attribute on a project/subproject that identified who the responsible party is. I can do that now, but I must create this attribute as a string type, and put in the name. Now I'm replicating information, not creating links, also not desirable.

So there are two suggestions to address this kind of issue:

1. Allow attributes to have a data type of "Info Item," where I can drag or otherwise link the value of that attribute to an Info Item.

2. When you create an attribute or apply it to an Info Item, allow the user to specify the cardinality of that attribute. In other words, there are some attributes for which you may want multiple values. For example, a Contact has multiple phone numbers. This is currently addressed by adding four phone number fields to the Contact, but this generalization doesn't always apply. If you had an Info Item for a phone number where, for instance you could indicate the phone number's use (home phone, work phone, mobile phone, pager, service, etc.), and you could specify this Info Item as the data type of an attribute, then you could have multiple attributes for a Contact to capture their various phone numbers. (The phone number Info Item would be a template, and the attribute value would be an instance of that template; whereas in the case of assigning a Contact to a Project, the Contact itself would be the value, not another instance of that Contact. I hope this makes sense.)

Thanks for a great product!!