I submitted this as one of our own tickets a while back (psst! - it's ticket #617) but figured I might as well post it on here as well to see if anyone else might be interested in it.
By nature, it seems like there's no way to avoid having a lot of fields, especially on big ticket entities like shots. While the fields can easily be rationalized as useful, they add up quickly, and to me, the worst part is, they make the menus enormous and potentially confusing.
So now I'm wondering, has there been any thought to allowing admins to customize the field groupings in menus? Maybe an additional field on the MetaSchemaField entity? Then, in the column chooser, you'd get something along the lines of the "Task Fields" grouping that has one entry, "Summaries" and then a context menu? And in the "Manage Columns" widget, you'd have additional dropdowns that revealed the fields within the grouping?
Here are some examples I would probably use it on:
- Lens information (right now we have 5 fields):
- Lens - Primary.
- Lens - Secondary.
- Lens - Wit 1.
- Lens - Wit 2.
- Shutter Speed.
- Priority (right now we have a specific one for most task types):
- Priority-Anim.
- Priority-FX.
- Etc.
- Stereo (right now we have 6 fields):
- Center Camera (Y/N).
- Convergence.
- Dominance.
- Interocular.
- Multi-Cameras (Y/N).
- Stereo (Y/N).
Most of the fields will still be loose. But being able to set up like 3-4 of these groupings would make the menus a lot cleaner and nicer for people, in my opinion.
Also, depending on what nets out in the calculated fields thread, this could also come into play:
https://shotgunsoftware.zendesk.com/forums/31278/entries/45187
If calculated fields are just initially going to be able to work with fields that are on the same entity, and not be able to do calculations that traverse links, then an alternative for us would be to make more fields and fill those fields with triggers. This would result in a lot more fields being created, obviously, and it would be nice to be able to organize them in the menus...
Ryan.
