Any possibilities to attribute specific column to lists?

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Hi everybody !

First, thanks for your fantastic work on tropy. I use it in ancient history for data, and it’s gorgeous.

I am obliged to share with you my use of tropy so that you can understand my request. Sorry in advance for the length of this message…
I use tropy for a database for my ancient history research. I am working on subaltern criticism in Rome.

I extract quotations that I use for different things. Sometimes it is about exchanges between a subordinate and a “superior”, sometimes it is about political or philosophical considerations about critical activity, and so on.

I sort out these quotations using the list system : I have a “subordinate critical” list, a “conceptualization of critical activity” list, etc.

Then, I use columns that I have customized to associate metadata to these extracts.
For example, for the “subaltern critics” I have columns for “speaker status”, “receiver status”, “form of criticism”, etc.
For excerpts on the “conceptualisation of critical activity”, I have other columns such as “Philosophical School”, “intertextuality”, etc.

The problem is that I am forced to have all the columns at the same time whatever the nature of my quotation. I was wondering if it was possible to make the visible columns specific to a particular list.
If this is not possible, maybe there would be another way to make the metadata appear in a specific way so that they can be sorted quickly?

I hope my explanation is not too confusing.
Once again thank you for the great work you are doing on this software.

Beautiful day.

rh

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Storing columns per list is an interesting idea. You will notice that Tropy already remembers the ‘sort’ column individually for each list and we could, similarly, remember all the columns. I’m worried that there are some practical downsides to this, however, because managing the columns across lists will get more complicated (e.g., how would you quickly add, move, or remove a column for all views?). Another idea, that might work is if we allow lists to hide individual lists. That way, the column configuration and order would be easy to manage globally, but individual lists could offer different views nonetheless. We’ll discuss this, to see if there’s a good way to make it work.

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