InfoQube IM - Community

Submitted by Pierre_Admin on 2020/06/04 16:34

Hi IQ Users !

IQ has many ways to create links, so how about a pane dedicated to links:

The links pane would show a unified view of all items, files and URL linked to the current item or items
The view would show a tabular list or 2-D surface of all links
A dropdown will allow users to select which link types to view (or all).
For example, children may not be pertinent when the item is viewed in a grid as it is already shown there
In tabular view, columns would be the link (item text, file, URL), link type, link sub-type, link depth
Currently IQ has 7 types of link: Parent, Child, Common Field, Common Tag, Related Items, Task Link, Hyperlink:
1. Parents: Flat list of all parents, grand-parents, etc
2. Children: Flat list of all children, grand-children, etc
3. Fields: For a user specified list of fields, all items that have a value (or the same value) for this field
4. Tags: All items that have a common tag with support for tag inheritance
5. Related Items: All items that are linked through Related Items, show depth level
6. Unlinked References: Items that contains text that references this item (i.e. that includes the item name)
7. Task Links: For Gantt / Next tasks links, show all items that are predecessors or descendants, show depth level
8. Hype rlinks: 2 types:
  - Embedded in text (any text field, such as item, notes, Doc pane)
  - Through fields, such as FileRef, URL and ItemHTMLFile

Pierre_Admin

IQ Designer

Comments

That's a great idea!

Consider my vote +1

Regarding the "2-D surface of all links", specially for related items, from their bi-directional links, any chance to automatic generation of graphs?

+1 Excellent idea.

Yes, love it.

One of InfoQube's greatest strengths is its ability to link info. A pane dedicated to managing these links makes great sense.

Wayne

Yes, that sounds like an amazingly useful feature to have! I'm getting excited about it already. Let me know if I can help in any way, e.g. by testing.

That would be an awesome "New" for 0.9.116

I have a request for the "Related items" view. Right now I am not using Related items as a structural feature of my database because having a long list of links in one field makes my grid unreadable. It also doesn't tell me why I related those two items. I want to relate many items across grids, and now I mainly do it via parent-child links.

Can we please have a way to sort related items into categories, either via their home grid or defined via a search query? For example "related items from the ideas home grid" versus "related items from the comments home grid"?

I would love to have those as columns in my grid or in the new links pane, with the clickable hyperlinks the way the Related Items column works now. I would rather not keep creating and closing scratch grids, so that I can have speedy overviews looking down rows of multiple items.

Or perhaps related items are not the best way to link many items, since the documentation says they are "ad-hoc"? Should I use parent-child links as the main connection point between items of different "types" that are in different grids?

Looking forward to hear your thoughts. Thank you!

As a rfinement of the 'Related Item' relationship you could have named relationships. Each related item could be given a name to go along with the link, like 'belongs to' or 'necessary for' or 'owes money'. So you could give a reason why the items are related.

As there are likely to be a limited set of relationship types in any one database then it could be just a drop down list which can be added to when required. so the name would be stored along with the related item link. If the box is not filled in then it would just default to 'Related'.

This would allow sorting and subdivision of the reationship field.

This is just an idea which might be useful, or might not be.

Hi Paul,

This would indeed bring it closer to Graphs (or directed graphs with nodes and directed vertices)

I've done some reading and it is currently in the subconscious dev. phase...

We'll see what comes out of that phase

Pierre_Admin

IQ Designer

Hi,

Just contributing to the discussion through a short screencast about how Atlas.ti's Link Manager works: https://bit.ly/37yR79a

I had in mind InfoQube "related items", and the possibility of dealing with "named" as well as "directed" relationships/links, ending up with the visualization of graphs.

Best!

Hi Cyganet,

Showing related items in grids is not practical when there are too many indeed, unless you turn off the column word wrap.

There are quite a few other UIs where you can see them however: related items toolbar, more info pane, Properties pane, ...

As to whether related items is the way to go for you, it is difficult to know. There are 6 types of "links" in IQ (collapsing parent and child links into one), plus one more if you add "showing a set of items in a specific grid" as a way to visually link items

Pierre_Admin

IQ Designer

Hi Pierre,

It could be obvious but in order not to miss one important functionality that I am not aware of regarding connecting items in separate grids, will you please explain what you mean by "showing a set of items in a specific grid" with one or two specific examples?

Thank you.
Alp

[quote=Alp]

[/quote]

Hi Alp,

No problem. What I mean is that as grids (and other UI, such as the IQ Surface) can show an arbitrary list of items, opening this grid shows these in the same context (i.e. a grid)

Having them show together is a way to link them

Ways to show an arbitrary list of items (i.e. not linked through fields or tags):

Use the Date filter, to groups what was worked on in any given date period
Live-Search result, to show either a static result (return a list of item ID) or a live search result (SQL query)
Hoist selected items in a grid. Drag items from other grids to this hoisted grid
Gather a list of items by marking them, then showing this list in a grid. Hoist to make it permanent
Marking items as Favorites

There could be more, those are the first ones that come to mind

By then doing SaveAs on this grid, saving it to a convenient name, will ease display of these items

HTH !

Pierre_Admin

IQ Designer

Hi Pierre,

What's the latest on the links pane? Is it coming soon? I've started making extensive use of both hyperlinks and related items in my CRM IQbase. This pane would give me a lot of flexibility to use hyperlinks in named fields (to describe the link type) instead of using unspecified "related items".

On a related note, the Ctrl+R keyboard shortcut for Item > Link Items(Related) wasn't active in my program, so I had to add it as a custom shortcut. Is it just me or do other people have the same?

Thanks!

Hi !

re Links pane: Still planned for v117 or v118

re Shortcuts: IQ does not enforce shortcuts, so at times it is good to reset these to get inline with "stock" IQ. Use Tools > Shortcuts > Reset

Pierre_Admin

IQ Designer

As of v117pre14, selecting…

As of v117pre14, selecting View > Links does not show a Links pane, and has no effect. Is this a bug or just a "not yet implemented feature"?

Indeed, I'll hide the…

Indeed, I'll hide the command until it is implemented

(Evernote sync got inserted to the top of the list, so we're still a few months away before work resumes on the Links pane)

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