How to make the same item appear in more than 1 place? Is it possible?

Submitted by Sheng on 2012/12/13 08:49
Is it possible to make the same item appear in more than 1 place, such as on different Grids, or on different branches of the same Grid, so that when the item is edited in one location, it is changed in its other location(s)? If so, how? Or what is this called? I've tried to find this in the documentation, unfruitfully alas, clueless about what such an operation has been named.

Comments

The basic concept of IQ is that items exist. Like you and me. The live in the "cube" (i.e. the IQBase).
Much like your TV set, you choose which items to display on each of the cube's faces (i.e. the grids, the calendar, etc)
 
Similarly, you also control the relationship between items. They can have any number of parents and children. Unlike most outliners, but like you and me, if I'm "deleted", my children are not (in fact, you're given the choice when deleting)
 
HTH !

Sheng

2012/12/14 06:18

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Thank you for clarifying the concept with that poetically esoteric common sense! It's interesting that the matter of deleting sub-items reveals the limit of the parent-child analogy. I suppose it depends on whether the sub-items are independent, as in parent-child and branch-leaf relationships -- or not independent -- the model of outliners which delete sub-items seems to follow . A more fitting analogy is for such cases may be a light beam split into a spectrum, as when a project is expressed in more detail by its sub-tasks (the latter is the former). Given this distinction, I much prefer the choice of whether or not to delete.

Yes, very much so -
there's two different approaches -
 
 
1) simply showing it in another grid.
 
The grid is a view of items using a particular filter/source - so if e.g. the item has a billing number in the billing field, and it also has e.g. a tick in the inbox field, it will show in billing and inbox grids.
 
For more info about Grids (& Items & Fields etc) see
 
 
2) I'm not even sure what showing an item elsewhere in a(ny) hierarchy is called - there was a big debate here a while back, because apparently 'clone' is a commonly used term for this action in related software - whereas clone (to me) means make an exact but new copy.

Showing an item in a new location usually means the same as giving it a new parent.
 
The easiest way to show an item elsewhere in the item hierarchy is Ctrl+drag to it's new location. It will now show both places.
I use dualpane layout for this (right-click a tab -> new window will open  a new 'instance' of the grid, 'New vertical tab group will get you dual pane - you can also get triple-pane etc). With two copies of the same grid open in dualpane it's easy to copy/move/give-items-new-parents within the same grid. (Likewise for different grids.)
 
Dragging an item and scrolling the grid can be a bit buggy - I've avoided it for a long time - may have been improved.
 
Another method is to copy an item and select 'in xml format etc' - when pasting you will be given the options to create a new item or 'link' (again an ambigious term imo) - the link is what you're looking for.
When deleting (Ctrl+E) an item that is shown more than once in a hierachy (can be different grids) - you are given the option to remove the parent link which would just remove it from current location
see
which also gives more details about dragging item
 
 
Hope that helps a bit ...
 
 
edited for clarity (hopefully!)
edit2 - added link for Grids
 

Sheng

2012/12/14 06:38

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That's good to know. Thank you for the helpful explanation and references to the documentation. I agree that "clone" suggests identical but independent copy rather than the same item. If taken with a pinch of salt and a glass of water, considering that all analogies are more or less limited approximations, I may be able to swallow it. The only real-world example I know of something identical actually existing in more than one place at the same time is of sub-atomic particles, (or so I've read in simplified descriptions) ... but I don't know the name of that phenomenon either.

Pierre_Admin

2012/12/14 13:10

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LOL !
 
This discussion is so cool ! Quantum entanglement ? Could be, but unlike it, in IQ, the same item can be seen, observed, even manipulated in many places at once without its quantum wave function collapsing into a single position...