More on Folder Woes
A few weeks ago I wrote a post on the pros and cons of using folders in document libraries (or any SharePoint list). I came across another BIG negative...
Let's say you have a document library that is structured by folders. As an example, let's pick Products. Within each folder, you have documents that include metadata. In the default view, things work pretty well; you get to navigate the folder structure and see the associated document metadata (for a given product). But, let's say you want to create a new view that has a filter applied. You would expect to see your same navigation with a subset of the matching data. Right? The reality is that you see no results. The only way to get results returned is to go into the View settings under Folders and choose to show data without the folder structure. This returns a flat list of matching results. Ugh!
Workarounds? Nothign very clean... the best I could come up with is to have an additional metadata item for the Folder name and group by that field. Which, of course, leads to the obvious question of why you have folders in the first place!
Food for thought.