Link attributes

[pmuckle]

Hi,

I've been looking at Ultra Recall for a day or two, and like it alot.

One thing I would really like to do is assign relationship type and attributes to the links themselves.

So a contact could be added to a project with a link 'project manager', and a reciprocal link 'project manager for' is automatically added to the contact. This would look like this:

-Projects
|_Project1
|_Contacts
| |_Project Manager - John Smith
| |_Finance Manager - Manager-John Smith

-Contacts
|_John Smith
|_Project Manager For - Project1
|_Company - Acme
|_Area Office - MyTown


I have explained this badly - there was a brilliant product called 'Info Central' (now discontinued - probably the best program I have ever used) which handled linking/relationships really well.

An easier solution for the Project-Role-Person link would be to have an additional field in the contact database for 'role'. You can simulate the effect by using the 'first name' field for 'full name', and enter the role in the 'last name' field.

This looks like this:

Project1
|_Project Manager, Bill Smith

The other thing is that the tree can get unwieldy and hard to read once you are several branches down.

Looking forward to the next release!

Pete

[xja]

I think you are getting at a couple of fundamental issues.

The first is whether to use Links or Attributes to add context to an InfoItem. UR is really good at letting a user:
(1) organize and browse by Links, and
(2) search and filter by Attributes.

In your example and in some of the samples that people have posted, it is clear that others are trying to deal with this... ie, you see people creating InfoItems labelled "Waiting" to which other InfoItems are linked, when that really should be an Attribute. However, since we can't organize and browse by Attribute, we end up using links instead.

Many of the suggestions on this board have been aimed at dealing with this (eg, filtering the tree, grouping the results/child pane, adding an "Attribute" InfoItem that effectively groups branches of a tree by Attribute value, etc.). It would be great if UR added a way to better organize/browse by Attributes so we wouldn't have to use Links where we should be using Attributes.

Second, as it is, each item has a group of uniquely-named Attribute fields and a separate list of links. It might be better to integrate the concept of Attributes and Links since Links are really just a type of attribute... eg, each InfoItem could have an unlimited number of user-defined Attributes, whereby each Attribute could include an attribute name, attribute value, and/or a link (multiple attributes with the same name could exist). So you could have Attributes without links or you could have an Attribute where Role = "Project Manager" with a link to one Project and another Attribute where Role = "Team Member" with a link to another Project. Even user-defined Keywords could just be a type of Attribute.

I realize such a change is no small task and raises other complexities, but I really think Attributes, Links and Keywords shouldn't be completely distinct and separate concepts in organizing information... and you should be able to organize and search by all three.