Posting Journal Feature Proposal: Column-Aware Context Menus

[jniles]

Presently, all of our utilities for the Journal sit in a utility bar above the Posting Journal. Most grids (Excel, Google Sheets) have some sort of context menu interaction (right-click brings up a menu) with their grids, in which they pack additional features. This is helpful from a UI perspective, since a context menu has great screen economy.

I propose that we begin to leverage context menus in our grids. This is a large discussion -- what we put in them, versus how they work. I'll give one view of how they might work and based on that, what I would put in them.

To make context menus powerful, I would make them "column-aware", meaning that they are told what type of data is in the column, and present a potentially different set of options given that information. For example, in SlickGrid, all columns are given ids, names, sorting functions, etc. In this case, we would add an extra property, such as "context: number", "context: date", "context: text", or others that will give us the power to tailor our menu to a given column. Here are some ideas regarding those options I just described:

1. Context: Number & Date -- For numeric columns, we should offer the following filters:
   1. Less than {{ value }}
   2. Greater than {{ value }}
   3. Equal to {{ value }}
2. Context: Text -- For text-based columns, we should offer the following filters:
   1. Exactly {{ value }}
   2. Contains {{ value }}
   3. Begins with {{ value }}
   4. End with {{ value }}
3. All columns should have sorters:
   1. Sort Asc
   2. Sort Desc
4. All contexts should have the option to "Group by {{ column-name }}"

Any new features might add some options to these menus. For example, there might be a case where the menu toggles totally on/off for groups of rows.

I'm convinced that we need these context menus, and perhaps the least controversial part of this proposal is sorting, so we can at least implement it with that. However, I'd be interested in hearing feedback on all the other features proposed here.

Mockup