Bases: Group By / Sorting improvement when an element has more than one element

Feature requests
,
1

Use case or problem

If a properties has more than one elements, such as in my case;

NOTE1.md
area:

  • Finance
  • Business

NOTE2.md
area:

  • Finance

When using Group By: “area” sorting, they are listed in two different groups;

Finance

  • NOTE1.md

Finance Business

  • NOTE2.md

Proposed solution

A much better way would it be;

Finance

  • NOTE1.md
  • NOTE2.md

Business

  • NOTE2.md

Current workaround (optional)

No useful workaround, other than not having more than one element in the “area” properties.

9 Likes
2

Totally agree. According to a team member in this post: Bases grouping (by property of list type) - Help - Obsidian Forum, this is not a bug, but the intended behavior.

There may be use cases for the current behavior, but I cannot think of one. On the other hand, there are many instances where I need the proposed behavior. If I am looking for movies of the Comedy genre, I want to look in the Comedy group regardless of whether the movie was also a Romance.

The only workaround is to use dataview which can split a list of values into separate groups. But then you lose the speed and editability of bases.

1 Like
3

seconding this request, as I’m making a Cookbook base and I want a recipe to show up in main dishes AND also in sides, not in a new group called main sides

1 Like
4

Same here, I’m trying to group music by author, but wher there are multiple ones for the same song (for example A and B), it creates a new group that lists the songs of “A B” rather than duplicating the entry and letting it show up in group A and in group B indipendently.
I feel like this change may allow list to be helpful in classification of stuff, while handling them basically as a string that concatenates all the elements of the array is not that useful imo, I’d rather use a string from the beginning at that point.

5

I agree. For me this feature request was the expected default behaviour. If I have a property Categories with Fiction and Drama, I don’t expect to get a group Fiction Drama and even Drama Fiction if I accidentaly mess up the order. I expect the movie or book to be listed in each of both categories (groups). Later I have other means to show me all books with both categories.
Well, this is only an example. Of course tags could be helpful for this kind of categories… :wink:
Thanks for sending in this feature request. I think it is an important one to make bases even better.