Sorting of taxa in Taxon tree

New Feature Requests
1

I have been doing a lot of mucking around in our Taxon tree in the last few weeks and yesterday I added just under 10,000 new (to our database) taxa of Fungi to the Taxon tree. The classification of Fungi is very incomplete and there are many taxa with missing intermediate main ranks in their higher classification. In the past, I have been using ‘Incertae sedis’ placeholders, but they make it a pain to work with the data and it turns out that Specify does not need them, even when the missing ranks are required. So, I have not added them for the taxa I added yesterday, and today I took out the placeholders that had been added earlier. The tree structure has become a lot clearer without the placeholders.

In Specify 6, tree elements are sorted by NodeNumber, which I can influence, so in Specify 6 the tree looks nice and clean and like I think it should look (mind you, a ‘Repair tree’ job might scramble the children again):

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However, Specify 7 does not use NodeNumber, but sorts the children of a parent alphabetically by Name only. So, in Specify 7, a branch with missing intermediate ranks looks a bit messier:

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It’s a small thing, but is there any chance we can get Specify 7 to sort children of a parent by RankID first and then by Name?

2

Hi @NielsKlazenga,

I’ve created an enhancement request to track this:

Thank you for reaching out!

3

Thanks Grant!

4

Hi @NielsKlazenga et al.,

I have great news. This functionality will be included in the next Specify 7 release!

Before

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After

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The sorting behavior will be customizable via User Preferences between ‘Rank ID’ (default), ‘Name’, ‘Full Name’, and ‘Node Number’.

Order By
Order By2384×618 66.7 KB

Thank you for making this request. We hope you and others will find this to be a significant improvement when working with trees in Specify!

5

Thanks @Grant, that is good news.