Proposal: add group sorting filter

[Frank Reininghaus]

Hi,

2013/10/8 Mark:
> Hi,
>
> I'm using Dolphin' "Show in Groups" for a couple of days now and i must say
> it works awesome! But while using it i began noticing missing certain
> features. The feature that i'm going to describe in this mail is the first
> one.
>
> When grouping is enabled i would like to have an option to sort the data
> inside the groups in a global manner (so not per group, that would become to
> complicated). My specific use case is grouping and then sorting the groups
> by size, name, date, ... any of the options that is currently available
> under Control -> Sort By.
>
> To make this example more "visible". My current setup groups by "type" and
> then i want to sort the new groups by "date". Right now that is not
> possible.

Allowing the user to group the files not by the "sort role", but by a
different "group role" would be possible. But like most features, this
would come at a price:

(a) Besides the existing menu entry "Show in groups", we would need
another menu "Group by". This would basically be a copy of the "Sort
by" menu, but should probably have another radio button "Same as sort
role" or something like that, which is chosen by default and which
would mean that the current behavior ("group role" == "sort role") is
used.

(b) Sorting items would have to be done in two stages: First sort by
the "group role", then identify where the groups start and end, and
sort these groups separately by the "sort role". Alternatively, one
could modify the "lessThan" function such that it compares items
according to the "group role" and uses the "sort role" as the
fallback. Either way, the code in KFileItemModel will become more
complex, and some additional code is needed in other places as well to
provide an interface between the "Group by" menu and the new member
variables in the model which would control the grouping behavior.

Now my question is: is there any evidence that this feature would be
so useful to a large user group that cluttering the UI with the
additional menu and making the code more complex (and thus harder to
maintain in the future) is justified?

Cheers,
Frank