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Submitted by David_H on 2014/12/22 21:01

I am having fun as I am figuring out IQ again but still need some help :D.

1. The title says it all. I'd like to create one grid that shows all items in it, including the TLI. I'd like a second grid that shows all the items in the first grid, EXCEPT for the very TOP TLI.

2. In the grid that shows the TLI, would there be a way for the TLI to be bolded ONLY if it has an active (not done) task beneath it?

Thanks

Comments

Hi David,

1a- By "all items" do you mean all items in the DB? Or all items with a specific field ? Probably the second option...?

Usually, you'll just turn off the "hierarchy" option. That will show as TLI all items meeting the source + filter.

If you want to see in a flat list even those items that don't meet the source (+ filter) in a specific grid... There are no dead simple ways to do that at the moment.

The "easiest" way woud be to use a separate field that's got inheritance turned ON for each grid. that field would also be in the source (source would look like : "fieldWithoutInheritance OR fieldWithInheritance") ; it would basically be used to mark any item that's being displayed in the context of certain grid. I did that for a while but I stopped as it has a few drawbacks : 1- it affects performance, 2- it gets hard to manage as the inherited field data propagates in places you don't necessarily want it.

Pierre had some ideas to solve that "problem" by filtering differently; I'll let him expand on that if he wants to.

In general though, it's not *that* important or useful to see a flat list of all items normally displayed hierarchically. what use case are you thinking of?

1b- As for not showing the very top TLI, this could be done in various ways : you could use the nbparents field or a specific field you assign yourself to those items that you decide are "very top TLI" (not sure about what you mean by that):

nbparents > 0

2- You would achieve that by using conditional formatting. Since - AFAIK -- the parent can't read the children's values, you'd have to have a column equation that propagates some data to the parent, e.g. adding the not done tasks... and as soon as the total = 0 (or whatever), the parent would not be bolded.

There are many ways of doing it depending on your workflow, the fields you use, etc. The idea is always the same : you need to add/substract items/data and the result is interpreted at the parent level as "no more tasks to be done" or "still something to do", and then you bold/unbold with a conditional formatting rule

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Windows 8.1

Sony Vaio S Series 13 (SVS131E21L)

Ram:8gb, CPU: Intel i5-3230M, 2.6ghz

Thanks for the details answer Armando.

[quote=Armando]

In general though, it's not *that* important or useful to see a flat list of all items normally displayed hierarchically. what use case are you thinking of?

[/quote]

I want to have a dedicated grid for what I refer to as "ongoing" tasks and I like to break them down by category. So some TLI's in that grid might be:

Exercise

Finance

etc...

and maybe there will be 50 of them.

That would still require me to scan through them visually even if there are no (open) subitems. So I was just thinking it would be cool if I created a second grid that was identical except it eliminated all TLI, and I could glance at the second grid to see if there are any open items below TLI.

Granted I could easily accomplish the same thing just by adding a field to the first grid and checking it for any open item, and then having the second grid display those items with TLI off, but I was thinking it would be cool if I didn't even have to do that.

Part of this is just me learning the program and figuring out how I'd like it to work for me as well as display information in an ideal world. That is both part of the fun and challenge of IQ, it is sort of like opening a Pandoras box because it is so flexible. Tell someone they can customize something endlessly and that's a dangerous thing :D.

Seeing some items "flat" is certainly useful -- I won't argue against that. What's probably not that usefull, is seeing all items flat.

So if the idea is just to see some items flat, namely subtasks, you could just turn hierarchy off and use a filter to not see the TLIs. How to do that depends on what characterizes your subitems exactly: are they identified as tasks/todos (with a specific field)? Are the TLIs also todos, so that the items below coud be qualified as "sub-tasks"?

Lets say your TLIs are characterized by a "ToDos" field" and so are those subtasks below. to see only TLIs, you'd use :

Hierarchy "on"

Source : ToDos

Filter : Done is null

And you'd get a list of all not done TLI tasks/todos.

lets say you'd like to see only the subs. You'd use :

Hierarchy "off"

Source : Todos

Filter : nbparents>0 and Done is null

... But this would work only if the TLIs in that grid aren't themselves children of other items in some other grid -- which can easily happen if you play with the multiple parents capabilities of items in IQ.

So if this doesn't work because the top level taasks/projects in that grid are sometimes children of other items (and so nbparents>0 wouldn't filter them out since they'd have parents) you'd have to either characterize those TLIs with some other fields that you'd use to filter them out (maybe : TLI, or TopLevelTask, or whatever...), and you could filter like this:

(Hierarchy "off", Source : Todos)

Filter: TopLevelTask is null and Done is null

That's the idea... But since I don't know what are your goals exactly, I can't say much more.

-------------------------------------------------------

Windows 8.1

Sony Vaio S Series 13 (SVS131E21L)

Ram:8gb, CPU: Intel i5-3230M, 2.6ghz

Column filters are easy to use:

I'm unable to upload a screenshot at the moment (not sure why).

Try thus:

simply hold mouse over column-header and an arrow appears on the right-hand-side,

Click, down at the bottom you can enter filter data, including using * as wildcard

(Note: there are also other options with column filtering.)

Tom has a good point. In that particular case, it would be tricky though.

Column filters, when all items are already visible/displayed in a grid are a quick way to isolate data. And they're now much quicker than they used to be.

-------------------------------------------------------

Windows 8.1

Sony Vaio S Series 13 (SVS131E21L)

Ram:8gb, CPU: Intel i5-3230M, 2.6ghz

[quote=Armando]

Tom has a good point. In that particular case, it would be tricky though.

Column filters, when all items are already visible/displayed in a grid, are a quick way to isolate data. And they're now much quicker than they used to be.

[/quote]

very good point there - I added emphasis, for emphasis :-)