I'm displaying an overview table of items. The items have a:
- category
- a date
- additional, domain-specific information that needs to be displayed in the same view
On the overview list, only one item is shown per category. The **most interesting**, from the user's point of view, is an item **in a given category** that has the latest date, but **no later than the current date**.
For example, suppose that today is 2015-08-26. We have the following items, the most user-relevant ones are **bolded**:
- Item 1, Category A, 2015-04-12
- **Item 2, Category A, 2015-06-30**
- **Item 3, Category B, 2015-07-12**
- Item 4, Category B, 2016-11-15
However, it is **also important that the user is made aware of items with dates in the future**.
Two ideas that come in to mind are either:
* provide a filter view for showing "future" items.
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* or mark categories with "future" items in some way (including a relevant mouseover).
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None of these feel perfect, however.
So, **what would be the optimum way to present such data, given the two constraints (temporal relevance, and presence of "future" items)**?