Group fields in Table View as columns (and maybe other places)

Ideas & Features
1

When working with larger databases, tables can quickly grow to many dozens of fields, which makes navigation across columns harder.

Currently it is possible to hide columns individually, but in practice many fields belong to logical groups (for example planning fields, metrics, metadata, etc.).

Suggestion:

Allow creating column groups inside table views.

For example:

Planning
• Start Date
• End Date
• Owner

Metrics
• Budget
• Revenue
• Conversion Rate

Metadata
• Created By
• Created Date
• Source

These groups could optionally have:

  • a color indicator or small colored dot near the column names

  • the ability to collapse / hide the entire group quickly

From a UI perspective, this could work in several ways. For example:

• A separate “Groups” section at the top of the column visibility panel (like in the screenshot).
• A quick toggle button above the database view to show/hide specific column groups.

This would make it much easier to manage wide tables, allowing users to temporarily hide entire sections of fields while keeping the structure organized.

Currently we can hide columns one by one, but grouping would make this much faster and more scalable for larger databases.

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3 Likes
2

I recommend to post every such thing as a separate request, thus it will have more chances to be noticed

1 Like
3

That’s a great Idea!

1 Like
4

Thanks for the tip! That makes sense — I’ll start posting these as separate requests from now on. :+1: :grinning_face:

5

I agree.

Particularly with TPH/STI, when we collapse an entity type hierarchy into one table, e.g. one table with a entity_type (discriminator field) instead of three separate tables one for each entity_type, this becomes even more useful.

Right now we have come up with naming convention for fields to help at least visually, with this. However since :, |, [, ] are not allowed in field names, we are somewhat limited to reusing @, <, >, (, ) in our names. For example we group by doing (@Group Name or Context) Field Name e.g. in Line Item shared with both Receivables and Payables we have (@Receivable) Covered Billables and (@Payable) Billed in, as the shorter version of (@Type=Receivable) Covered Billables and (@Type=Payable) Billed in.

I have found that using naming conventions that our AI Agent can access, we can make changes to the views more easily, while no field grouping exists. I hope this helps you, too.

:100: :clap: Of course Fibery has implemented many amazing features that help with this, such as Hide/Default Entity Views, as well as the plethora of Collection Views.

1 Like