aeontimeline

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Show only certain entities

dianemountford
Thu, 02 Nov 2017 01:39:45 GMT

I have a lot of characters in my novel (more than 50 and counting), and am using Aeon Timeline to organize them all. However, as I work out the exact relationships of events, I want to filter down my view so I'm only showing five main characters and any events they're in. I built a filter called "main characters" that is formatted like "Entity:Character 1 OR Entity: Character 2 OR ... Entity:Character 5" I'm in group by person mode. My filter seems to work to show only events involving my main characters, but still lists all the characters. How do I ONLY group by the five selected characters, and show any events they're in? In the previous version, there was a dialogue where I could uncheck anything I didn't want to display. But I don't see that in version 2.

razyr
Thu, 02 Nov 2017 13:35:22 GMT

Hi, Diane. AT2 has a little gear icon in the top left which let's you restrict what columns you display, but it doesn't make the corresponding rows disappear for hidden columns. @francisvachon made the same observation/request recently over in [this thread](https://www.aeontimeline.com/forum/channel/#!/support/user-interface:group-by-filter). We came to the conclusion that the missing feature is a button to optionally toggle display of entities that are empty (ie don't have any events which match the current filter). I think the best you can hope for right now is to "group by" something other than the people/participant entities. You might want to create a custom entity type which you use for specific groups or views that may or may not have much to do with your actual story/data. You could use these groups to force events together for specific views. This other entity type could be as simple as a single entity named "Principals" which you assign to your five major characters. That would at least make them bubble to the top in your views. Perhaps someone has a more elegant solution?

dianemountford
Fri, 03 Nov 2017 00:31:54 GMT

Hmmm. Well, that makes the tool pretty useless for me. And hiding blank rows won't work, because I have big events that involve just about everyone. So even if I filter to only events where my main characters are involved, and hide blank lines, that won't hide much. What I really need is a filter on people, rather than just a filter on events. I'll keep my ear to the ground, but I think I'm going back to AT1, and hope it keeps working with whatever operating system upgrades Apple forces on me.

razyr
Fri, 03 Nov 2017 00:37:48 GMT

If the page hid not just events, but also the rows for everyone who didn't match the filter, isn't that what you want? I just called them "empty" because the way they show up now, you have many empty rows where all of the content is blocked by the filter.