Summary
Using “Show all groups” in the “Arrange and manage groups” for GroupBy on the column type “Select list” does not factor in the “Selectable Options” function defined in the “Select list” configuration.
Detailed Description Through Use Case
I have a table for my commitments. The commitments span across multiple Responsibilities such as “Personal” and “MAST”. For the purpose of this demonstration, we are interested in the 5 commitments under the “Personal” Responsibility.
In my “DB - Projects” table I have a column to specify the Commitment, which is a “Select list” that is filtered to only show options from the “Commitments” table where the Responsibility is the selected responsibility. See the formula defined for the “Select list”:
This means, when you create a project and set the Responsibility to “Personal”, the follow happens when I go to select a Commitment. You’ll notice that only 5 options appear.
HOWEVER, when you group the “Projects” table by the “Commitment” column, the “Show all groups” option would force my “all” to include EVERY COMMITMENT, ignoring the filter function I have set for the “Selectable Options”:
For me, this would show all 21 commitments across my various responsibilities, instead of just the 5 that are attributed to my “Personal” responsibility.
Why is this an issue?
In my opinion, the purpose of “Show all options” is to give the user an understanding of what “Select list” options have nothing under them. This allows users to recognize when something is missing, or needs to be added. In this current state, the user has to pick between not seeing Select list options with nothing attached to them, or seeing all available options regardless of the filter function setup they have, making the observed list rather useless.
Edit: Thinking about this more, I think a reasonable solution would be a third bullet option besides “Show all groups” and “Show online groups with values”. This option would be called something like: “Show all selectable groups” and would simply reference the available options based on the “Selectable Options” list or formula.
Let me know if you need additional details.
Lloyd