Add ability to turn On or Off, the display of marker comments in the left side panel

Mike Fontenot
Turn ON/OFF the display of comments of Markers in that left hand panel? I use ST for wildfire assignments and organizing map objects in folders helps a lot. But we put a lot of repeater site information in the comments field. Doing that causes all that to display and take up space on the left side panel. Then it makes viewing various map objects, and forcing a lot of scrolling
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Comments

3 comments

Date Votes
  • Comment author
    caver456

    Just another SAR user here - I also feel the real estate taken up by comments is a mixed bag, and it's probably different for every agency, varying with how they make use of comments.  For us, it's nice to see a few of them all the time, like missing person info; but for many of them, often it just takes up too much real estate and results in a lot of scrolling to accomplish fairly basic things.

    Two thoughts:

    1) left-clicking a folder title will toggle that folder between expanded and collapsed.  Maybe make that left-click action cycle the folder through three states instead of two: a) expanded, b) expanded-but-comments-hidden, c) hidden.  When b), maybe items with comments could have an ellipsis (...) on the same single line as the item name, to indicate there are comments, and maybe hovering on the item (still in the left bar) could show its comments.

    2) add a folder-navigator button, that shows a popup (when clicked, or maybe just when hovered) listing all folders.  Clicking (or hovering) an entry in that popup could scroll the left bar to that folder.

    Either way - figuring out the best way to deal with left bar length would win.

    2
  • Comment author
    caver456

    For the idea of tri-stating the folder title click as in 1), maybe b) could be bypassed completely if it wouldn't be much use for that folder, i.e. if the total line count of all comments in that folder is small.  In that case, left-clicking the title could just be a two-state toggle like it is now.  Just brainstorming.

    0
  • Comment author
    CalTopo

    I agree that this can be problematic at times; importing a KML file with attributes listed as an HTML table probably being the worst-case example.  We have plans to eventually do a ground-up rewrite of the left bar for both technical and UI reasons, and I think that when we do so we'll probably support some kind of a solution to this problem, but we're unlikely to tackle it in isolation prior to that rewrite.

    3

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