Ability to group by sub-collections with recursiveCollections enabled

johnbellessa
Hi all,

I apologize if this has already been requested. I feel like it could be really handy to be able to have citations grouped by sub-collections within the main view when the recursiveCollections option is set.

Is there any chance something like that might be possible? Or, if it's not something that would make its way into the main release, would it theoretically be possible for a plug-in to do it?

Thanks!
John
  • aurimas
    What's the use case here?
  • johnbellessa
    Basically it would help make top- or mid-level collections more manageable when recursiveCollections is enabled. As it is, you just get an alphabetized list of all citations, which can be frustrating if you have a lot of citations within the selected collection's sub-collections.

    For instance, I have a ton of citations grouped into really granular sub-collections. Those sub-collections basically group the citations by specific topics. By having them all displayed at once, I can visually scan through all of the citations while also having the context of which sub-collection they're in.
  • aurimas
    edited September 24, 2014
    Nothing of the sort is possible and I have a hard time visualizing how we could display subcollection information in the middle pane. I can understand a column that displays the subcollection name, but there are various issues when it comes to sub-subcollections (do you display a path to the sub-subcollection or just the name of the sub-subcollection? if latter, what if it's ambiguous? if former, that makes for a long string to display) and items belonging to multiple subcollections (do you display just one? do you display all in some sort of list?)

    What has been discussed is adding filtering/faceted searching to narrow down what's displayed in the middle pane. That could, in theory, allow you something like filtering on a subset of subcollections.

    Other than that, depending on how many different categories you are interested in, you could assign colored tags (up to 6 at this point) that are displayed as color swatches in the center pane. That's probably the closest to what you're looking for.
  • fbennett
    If the ALT collection reveal were available as a rollover, might that serve the purpose as well? (I'm not sure how it behaves with recursive subcollections enabled.)

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