Web Client: Patron Search Column Picker - long list

Related to:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/evergreen/+bug/1669866

The column picker dropdown for all interfaces has a very long list of options that is not sorted in any obvious way. To improve usability, it should either be completely alphabetical or have some sort of dividers/section headers.

Working branch user/jeffdavis/lp1752983-column-picker-sort-alpha has a fix that sorts the column picker alphabetically.

However, I think pure alphabetical sort is less than ideal. On the checkout grid, for example, you end up with two "Barcode" entries next to each other in the column picker; one is for patron barcode and the other is for item barcode, but you can only tell the difference by hovering over and seeing the tooltip.

I wonder if it would be better to group them into sections, e.g. "User" and "Item" for the checkout grid, with menu items alphabetized within each group. An easy approach would be to sort by idlclass, then label:

<li ng-repeat="col in columns | orderBy:['idlclass','label']">

But this is confusing unless you add a header for each IDL class, which is a little trickier. You also risk putting the most useful/most used entries down at the bottom of the list. The discussion in bug 1669866 may be relevant here.

We talked a bit about column pickers at the hack-a-way. I was working on https://bugs.launchpad.net/evergreen/+bug/1735808 at the time, but I didn't make as much progress on it as I had hoped.

The header option was raised, but it sounded like it wasn't something that was easy to do. I think we do have some that are sorted by idlclass then alphabetically (Item status maybe)? but the label doesn't always make it clear which class you are in.

At the hack-a-way, I think there was consensus that if we explicitly included specific fields, we would have the opportunity to label them in a way that would make it clearer what we were looking at. What I was hoping was that the list would sort in the order that they were listed in the tt2 file.

However, that's not working. See bug 1731278.

I think my preference would be to 1) explicitly identify all of the columns that should appear and 2) to have the sort order be the order in which they are entered in the tt2 file. The problem with #1, of course, is that it takes a lot of time to identify all those fields.

Alphabetical is an improvement over random, but, in some cases, I think we want more important fields to show above other fields that are less likely to be used.