Creating and editing columns

Your notebook can have multiple columns that will display values such as title, and creation date that are associated with your entries. Mori comes with a set of build in columns, and you can also create your own.

By default only a few columns are visible, to make more columns visible:

1. Choose Edit > Columns and check (by selecting the menu item with the same name as the column) the columns that you want shown.
2. Once a column is showing you can change its order by dragging the column’s header to a different location in the entry view.
3. Click in a column header to sort the entries by the contents of a column. Click again to reverse the sorting. And click a third time to clear the sorting and view your entries in their natural order.

Here’s the entries view showing the build in columns Flagged, Title, Words count, and Creation date.

You can also create your own columns, and once you’ve created them you can define new rules in your smart folders that access those columns. To create and edit your own columns:

1. Choose Edit > Columns > Edit Columns to open the column editing sheet.

For now the interface that you need to use to create your own columns is powerful, but not very friendly. I hope to fix that in the future, but for now here’s a walk through of your options when creating a new column. First here’s what the interface looks like.

The “Edit User Columns” sheet is divided into two parts. First there is a list of columns that you have already defined (Mori’s built in columns are not listed here), and next are a bunch of values associated with the select column in that list. These are the steps that you should take when creating a column.

1. Click the “Add Column” button to add a new column to the list of columns.
2. Select that column in the list, and then give the column a “Name” in the name text field. The name will only be used internally by Mori and shouldn’t contain any spaces, only letters. You won’t see this name in Mori’s user interface. Here are the names that some of Mori’s built in columns use. ‘title’, ‘flagged’, ‘dueDate’, ‘creationDate’.
3. Give the column a label. This is the name that you’ll see in Mori’s user interface. The name can include spaces. Shorter names are generally better because they don’t take up so much space when the column is being shown in the entries view.

That’s the basics of creating a new column. But there are some more options for experts.

• By default new columns can contain plain text. But if you change the ‘type’ setting you can change them to store dates, yes/no values, or different kinds of numbers. Here are what some of type types mean.
  • NSStringAttributeType, this type stores plain text.
  • NSDateAttributeType, this types stores dates.
  • NSInteger32Attribute, this type stores integer numbers like 1, 2, 42.
  • NSFloatAttributeType, this type stores floating point numbers like 1.3, 10.0, 0.27.
• Each column can also have a summary rule. When a summary rule is set entries that have children will display a summary of the values of their children. Entries that don’t have children will display their actual value. The different summary rules are.
  • None. This is the default, and means their is no summary rule.
  • Total. This summary rule displays a total of the children values. This rule is available for number typed columns.
  • Minimum. This summary rule displays the minimum of the children values. This rule is available for number typed columns.
  • Maximum. This summary rule displays the maximum of the children values. This rule is available for number typed columns.
  • Average. This summary rule displays the average of the children values. This rule is available for number typed columns.
  • Hidden. This summary rule hides the column value for entries that have children.
• The last set of options are the notebook settings.
  • Include in entry view columns list This is checked by default, if it’s not checked then the column will now show up in the list of columns that can be shown in the entries view. Unless you are creating a hidden column for a plugin you shouldn’t uncheck this option.
  • Value is editable when displayed in column This is checked by default, if it’s not checked then you won’t be able to edit the column values when they are displayed in the entries view. Again you should leave this checked unless you are writing a plugin that will manage the values in this column on its own.
  • Include in smart folder rules This is checked by default, if it isn’t checked then you won’t be able to use the column when you define rules for smart folders.
  • Include in text search index This is checked by default, when checked your searches in the toolbar search field will be able to match text that you’ve entered into the column.