How best to display "child record" fields?

dubois_j

Looking best way to display/sort/filter properties of a child record.

We have an item, which has one or more sub-items and on the sub-item we have a date field (possibly other fields) which the user wants to be able to see/sort/filter on.

Parent Record (date)
- Child record name, type, date
- child record name, type, date

Do you create individual columns for each "sub-record" and then display the values? Don't think this will work, but this is what I was asked for by users and don't feel it's best (for reason below).

This could cause a lot of empty columns, if I have 3 sub-records type1, type2, type3.
Record 1|date|CR-1|Type1|date1|CR-2|type2|date2|CR-3|type3|date3
Record 1|date|CR-1|Type1|date1|CR-3|type3|date3
Record 1|date|CR-2|type2|date2|CR-3|type3|date3

Thanks for help/thoughts/direction.

bindrid

do you want to build something like https://www.datatables.net/examples/api/row_details.html ?

dubois_j

I don't think the users want something like that as I have shown them a mockup of that before.

I believe they want to be able to sort on the dates, thus I believe it has to be a primary table row. But if we only have a single column for all sub records how do you sort on the different dates? If we have multiple columns for each sub record, how bad is it for those that don't have values? How to keep aligned, etc. Because sub record is a list of records, so type3 could be third record or first record, etc.

kthorngren

Maybe you are looking to use orthogonal data?
https://datatables.net/manual/data/orthogonal-data

Kevin

dubois_j

Interesting, was not aware of that feature, nice to know - though not what I am looking for.