Per Group selection of Documents pane columns

Setting up a selection of columns for the Documents pane of the “Three Panes” view (upper-right pane) seems to be a global property for the entire database while, in my opinion, it should be specific for each group (with a default set for newly created groups).
For instance it only makes sense to see “From” and “To” columns for groups storing my mails.

It’s such a basic feature for any file manager that I suspect I’m missing something here.
If I’m not, please consider it a feature request.

Thank you for the suggestion! This is not yet possible, right now the setting is specific for each database. Therefore the only workaround would be to store e.g. all emails in a separate database.

I see a downside for making sets of columns by group rather than database.

Depending on what I’m doing, I’ll set up the columns I want to be visible. It takes only moments to do that, and my set of columns persists throughout the database.

But if the setup of columns were done group by group, it would be irritating if my task required looking at the contents of a number of groups and resetting the columns for each independently.

If there were a setting in Preferences to establish a set of columns, I would then go to that to select the columns to be displayed, and (I would hope) click the option to have that set displayed for all groups. But then I’ve had to do an extra step just to get back to the current status in DEVONthink.

I often have individual email messages scattered about in a database, because their content is relevant to a project or topic. As I’m interested in content, i wouldn’t need to view/sort by From or To (although that information is available by inspection of the message).

I have a database that contains more than ten thousand email messages. In that database I do find the From column useful. It allows me to sort by sender, so that I can quickly get to messages from a certain person or company. But even in that database, depending on what I’m doing, I may temporarily uncheck the From column to make screen room available for another column.

I don’t try to maintain a default set of columns. I check and/or uncheck them depending on my needs at the moment. When i’m making such changes, I prefer them to be database-wide. Often, I display only two, Date Modified and Kind. At other times it may be important to have file size, word count, Date Added or Spotlight Comments columns displayed.

Perhaps Christian can figure out how to satisfy both of us. :slight_smile:

Christian thanks for the answer.
Keeping my mails in a separate database is possible but this way I don’t take advantage of a great feature of DTPO i.e. the ability to store mails (in a dedicated group) along with other project documents.

Bill, I see the point (interesting as always).
I didn’t expand in my previous post so here’s my tentative proposal:
Each group could have a boolean property (something like “File list default columns”) with a checkbox in the info panel.
If the property is checked (default for new groups) nothing changes with respect to the present behavior and changing the columns of a group (with the property checked) changes the columns of all groups with the property set (accomplishing Bill’s workflow).
If you want a specific group to have a different set of columns you need to uncheck the property and then arrange the columns; groups with the property unchecked will not follow the global changes and must be changed individually.

This feature will be useful when you reserve a group for a specific kind of records and its power is proportional to the variety of column types available (another feature request? :slight_smile: ).
For instance if columns specific to metadata of picture/audio/video were available you could build a very effective group view and, as you noted, performing a search would be as fast as ordering a few columns.