In DEVONthink Pro, there’s a preference to “Display number of items inside groups.”
As an alternative to this, it would be extremely useful to have a preference to display the number of immediate subgroups within each group.
Why? (I’m just curious.) Why not two levels down, or six, or every level?
A hypothetical example:
You own a business and create a DEVONthink database to store documents associated with your customers’ orders.
You create a group for each customer, and a subgroup for each order to contain all of the documents associated with that particular order.
With the current “Display number of items inside groups” setting, beside each customer-group you’d see the total number of documents associated with that customer, but that’s a useless statistic for the purposes of this database. The option I’ve proposed would allow you to see the number of orders placed by each customer, which is obviously more useful.
Now let’s say the business grows and you hire a team of salesmen.
You create a group for each salesman to hold the customer-groups (and the order-subgroups contained therein) that have been assigned to him.
You’d like to balance the number of customers assigned to each salesman, but with the current “Display number of items inside groups” setting, beside each salesman-group you’d see the the total number of documents associated with that salesman’s clients – again, a useless statistic for the purposes of this database. The option I’ve proposed would allow you to see the number of customers assigned to each salesman. As to your question: Including two levels down, etc, would allow you to see the number of orders assigned to each salesman, which actually would be a useful option also, but isn’t what is desired in this particular example.