Intrepid dogfooder Alex ran across a behavioral glitch last week that
Dan S of QA-fame has brought up before.
He restored his settings to migrate from Alpha 4 to a trunk build
only to find that none of his items were sectioned appropriately. His
NOW section was littered with DONE and LATER items. He tried clicking
on the Triage Status column header to sort the items, expecting that
the items would auto-magically pop into place. To his dismay, no
matter how many times he clicked sort, and he did so many, many, many
times, the result was always the same.
He reported what he thought was a bug to Jeffrey and after
downloading and setting up many, many, many builds with the same
result, that what Alex thought was a bug, was expected behavior.
How could that be? Why wouldn't you want sorting by Triage Status to
file items into their appropriate sections. When Alex reported this
bug to me, I thought, What an exceedingly reasonable expectation!
Fortunately, Jeffrey remembered what I had forgotten:
Currently we use sectionTriageStatus as a way to 'pin' newly created,
recently edited, newly updated, newly received items at the top of
the NOW section so that no matter what buttonTriageStatus an item
has, Chandler draws the user's attention to it by plopping it at the
top of the NOW section.
In the edge case that a user happens upon a dashboard view that is
sorted by a column other than Triage Status, say the Date or Title
column, there may be items in this 'pinned state' that the user can't
see because the view is not sorted by Triage Status.
Soooo, if we make it so that clicking the Triage Status column header
to sort by Triage Status does the *same* thing as clicking on the
Triage button in the toolbar, namely, files items into their
respective Triage Status sections...then the hapless user described
above would *never* see the items that Chandler was supposed to bring
to their attention.
Semi-Final Analysis?
+ Jeffrey's case is undesirable, but how common is it?
+ I wouldn't be surprised if quite a lot of people have the same
expectation that Alex and Dan had because people are unlikely to see
the backdoor reason described above for *not* having the TS column
sort behave like the Triage button in the toolbar.
Post-Preview Solution?
What if we had the TS column header behave like the Triage button in
the toolbar *only if* the user is already sorted by Triage status.
That means:
+ If you're already sorted by TS, sorting by TS again files items
into their appropriate sections.
+ If you're not already sorted by TS, sorting by TS status first
shows you the items in their 'pinned' state and then only when you
sort again do the items get filed into their appropriate sections.
I am logging this as an UI bug for me to track as we get more dogfood
feedback: https://bugzilla.osafoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=9175
Thanks Alex and Jeffrey for unearthing this scenario :)
Mimi
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