Hi. First Post. Thanks for your great piece of software. I bit the bullet and bought the licence fairly recently.
Although Windows Explorer lacks many things, in Windows 7 has the following very useful filtering feature.
The user can quickly filter the contents of the folder currently displayed by:
(1) View folder in "Details View"
(2) Click small arrow to right of any column header/field
(3) A list of criteria appears, by which to filter that column (see examples below)
(4) Each criterion has a checkbox
(5) User can select one or more criterion per column
(6) User can filter on more than one column
(7) Files (or Directories) that match all conditions are shown, those that do not are hidden
eg
File Name: A-H; I-P; Q-Z
File Type: .doc;.xls;.txt
Date Modified: Calendar; This Year; This Month; This Week; Yesterday; Today
Size: 0-10KB; 10-100KB; 100-1000KB; 1-16MB; 16MB-128MB; >128MB; unspecified
etc.
Is this feature available in Directory Opus?
If not, could you please consider adding it (ie make this post a feature request, rather than a help request).
The nearest I can find in Directory Opus is the Filterbar.
This allows you to complete steps 3,4,5 & 7 above, but not steps 2 or 6.
That is, it appears to be restricted to one column/field at a time; and one specific field at that (ie File Type).
I am aware that one could go off and design many Custom Filters and create buttons for them etc.
There are a couple of problems with that though.
(1) I'm not sure if I have the skills
(2) The filters I create would be static, whereas the ones in Windows Explorer adjust dynamically to the content of the folder (as does DOpus's Filterbar). (eg .doc checkbox is only offered if currently visible folder contains Word Documents). Also, once a filter is applied (or removed) in one column/field, then the criteria offered in the other columns' lists adjust appropriately.
The beauty of a dynamically generated checkbox list is the speed of operation, and simplicity.
If you do consider adding this feature, then it would be great to have a second list of checkboxes to hide items matching a particular criterion, rather than just a show checkbox.
I have seen that DOpus has this ability (Show Filters and Hide Filters) because I have created a few custom folder formats.
The Filter Bar lets you quickly filter files by extension, via the drop-down menu of extensions it has. (One way to open it is to push *, then click on the drop-down.)
Some of the other things could sort-of be done by grouping (alt-click a column header, then collapse the groups you don't want; the groups are pretty similar to the search groups you mention), although it's not quite the same of course. You could probably made a button which grouped by a column and automatically collapsed all the groups, so that you could then expand the ones you were interested in... In theory, that might work pretty well, at least for single-column filtering (it won't let you do multi-column filtering/grouping, of course), although I haven't tried it and might be wrong in reality.
Oooh, I never realized this feature existed in Explorer. Now that you mention it, I second your request to include something like that in a future version of Opus. It is a really neat feature.
That Alt+ Click on the Column Headers is handy for grouping alright. I wasn't aware of that yet.
The problem is that Ctrl+ A will select the collapsed groups as well as expanded ones, and any operation applied thereafter will affect everything, whether collapsed or expanded.
Whereas Ctrl+ A after applying one of more filters, only selects the files that match the filter(s), and any operation applied thereafter will only affect the desired files.
I note that you can Ctrl+ Click one one or more collapsed groups instead of Ctrl+ A and just operate on them.
Similarly, Checkbox Mode seems to work. Interestingly, the selection persists even after regrouping by a new Column Header. Also Invert Selection works. Or after regrouping by another factor, you can deselect the entire Group of files that match an unwanted criterion (or individual files within it).
Lots of possibilities, but takes lots of brain power to think up the strategy in advance!
Something simliar to the FilterBar method is so much handier though, just click or unclick each check box (and in Windows Explorer, do so on multiple columns). And as I said in the last post:
I'd love it if you guys could consider including this in future versions or if some technical wizz comes up with a solution in the meantime, great! I'm using Directory Opus for 95% of the time.
PS I added another post today re sort order for movie titles (ignoring "A" and "The"), if you've any ideas.
