In my project I basically have an arbitrary number of items with some properties that are organized in groups. The user can select items in a group to perform certain actions on them. He can also delete items or move them to a different group.
I have experimented with different layouts:
My first approach was to use a List with groups in it like in this picture (I got this picture as an example from http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/7050/ListView-Grouping-XP-Style ):
While this basically worked it presented problems (especially implementation wise, but this doesn't matter here) if each group contains a lot of files. I had to present a group browser along side of it to jump to a specific group, because it was very painful to search the group in the long list. Hence I didn't like this design.
The next idea I had was a Tabbed design, with one Tab for each group:
This works as well but may present difficulties if
- There are too many groups
- The groups names become too long
The third idea I have and right now like the best is to show a Single Table with a combobox at the top to select the group:
Selecting a group:
This makes the groups clearly laid out and simple to select, hides the irrelevant items and should not have problems with long group names.
Now I wonder if there is a better way to show groups of data that is convenient to use or a standard way of doing things that the user is more familiar with?