A small preamble may needed to best answer this...

 

In designing a data system, one must generally answer the following questions:

Answers to such question can guide you when designing your system.

 

Regarding your specific question, you can of course easily put the call under both items, IQ supports multiple parents.

There are multiple methods but all required some kind of manual intervention...

 

Question for you ?

I'm not a particular big fan of using extensive hierarchies. At least for such applications. 2-4 levels seems like a nice maximum. This is my relational database background speaking.

But this is a personal preference, others like deep hierarchies. IQ is flexible that even in these cases, it can collapse the hierarchy to focus on some aspects.

 

HTH !

 

Pierre_Admin

 

[quote=David_H]

You make a call to him and want to log it and want it to appear as a record both under the project AND under his name in the address book?

[/quote]

 

Pierre has good points for a more in depth thinking process about how to manage your data in general.
 

- I personally use hyperlinks when I don't need the actual data to appear at 2 or more places at the same time but want to refer to it easily.
 

- I use multiple parents when I really need to have items at more than one place at the same time.
This adds complexity to the structure and can lead to mistakes (e.g. 1- erase items you didn't want to erase because you  forgot they were also there, 2- marking items as done and loosing what's underneath because you forgot about it, 3- modifying items and forgetting that the modifications won't work with the other contexts in which they are also used, etc.), BUT it can also be extremely useful (e.g.. : you need to see the data right there because it's part of a bigger text, you need to know how many time it's been linked to another item (using the nbparents field), you need to see it in different  contexts to make structural decisions, you need to see all the options/items right there before your eyes without going back in forth between grids, etc.)

So, for multiple parents I use a system in which I often add an extra  item in between the parent and the child to visually clearly indicate that the parent above isn't the main one.
BUT sometimes I won't do that if I know mistakes won't be a problem, and I rely instead exclusively on the nbparents field that I usually put near the item fields in my grids. And, using conditional formatting, I Color code the  nbparents field to make it easy to notice when an item has 0, 1 or more parents.

 

For example, in the screenshot below, the "4" in the purple cell indicates that the item has 4 different parents. The Color purple immediately tells me "Ah! that item is used in different places". 

 

 

 

In this next screeshot, I use  the intermediary item I talked about. It's the orange one  (note that all colors are automated, I don't do that by hand... otherwise, what would be the point of using a computer?)

The orange item clearly shows me that the items below are also found in other contexts and that I need to be cautious.

 

 

 

Now, how do you create parent links? It's certainly in the manual, but since I'm procrastinating big time, here you go:

Creating parent links can be done in several ways;

 

1- Select your items and Ctrl+Drag&Drop to some other parent.

OR

2- select your items, right lick and select "tag** items". select the parents under which you want them, right click and select "add items as sub-items" (I have shortcuts for all of that so I never right click anywhere) -- note that you can the tagged items list, add items it, etc. You can always see that list in the properties pane.

OR

3- select your items, ctrl+shift+C (to see the copy dialog), copy as XML (choose the xml option that fits your bill) and then go UNDER the parent you want as the extra parent, and paste (Ctrl+V) as LINKS.

 

I usually use 1 and 2.

#1 when it's easy to do (a couple parents to drag from one visible place to another immediately visible place), #2 when I want to do more complex manipulations, tag items from different parents to create a bigger list, add them to several parents, etc.

But I don't have a rule... I just do what feels convenient.

 

 

**tag : I've had discussions with Pierre about the word "tag". It's misleading and will probably be changed at some point for something like "collect", or something like that. In IQ "tagging" doesn't mean adding a tag like we're now used to hear.
"Collect" seems more straight forward : collect items, add items the collection, empty the collection, add the collected items/collection under the parent, etc.

 

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