Basket and Attachments

Journals hold entries chronologically, you can search in them by text and type and you can find things by date easily. But information is not always found in the right order and you may want to make more arbitrary collections of entries and may want to put them in a particular order. This is what attachments allow you to do.

You can already add things to an entry like images or maps to an entry, and attachments let you add other entries from the journal and other journals. Attached entries appear in a list below the main entry in a tab next to the replies tab. Once entries are attached you can change the order of the entries by hand and can add and remove attached entries at any time.

Scenarios

Here are some imaginary scenarios that may give you ideas about how you might use collections.

Recipes

You have a journal you save recipes into. You might save them from web sites or you might type them in from recipes you already have in books. After a while the journal gets long and finding the ones you want becomes more difficult.

So you create a new journal to organise them. You create some entries, like "Favourite desserts", "Favourite Mains", "Chicken Dishes", "Vegetarian Dishes", "Quick Meals". You then go through the first journal attaching the recipes to the category that fits. If a recipe suits more than one category then it can be added to more than one category easily.

Now instead of going directly to the source recipes journal you go to the second journal and find the category that you are interested in and can peruse the shorter more specific list.

Handbook or FAQ

You are using a journal to create a handbook of procedures and policies. Maybe this is used to help new members or employees learn how to do things the way the group wants.

You add entries for each of the policies, procedures, and resources people may need to know about. All the information is there but it is hard to navigate or read in any sort of order.

So you create a new entry called "start here", and then you attach the an entry for each major section of the information: Organisation structure, Addresses and Contacts, Delivery Process, Services Offered, Application Process, etc.

Then you go through the entries and attach them to the the appropriate section entry. Now the handbook journal has a two level hierarch which makes finding and using the information significantly easier.

This process can be taken further using the Outline mode which provides an overview in the NavList and presents the index page automatically as the starting point. Outline Mode is a Club Tier feature.

Idea Synthesis

You might be researching a subject like World War II. So you create a journal to store the information you find. You add links from reading articles and found videos and so on.

You begin to notice that patterns or topics that keep coming up. So you create entries for D-Day, Eastern Front, French Resistance, and so on. You start attaching articles to these entries so you can quickly find the things you have found in these topics. Some resources may belong in more than one, and so you can add the same entry into as many of the topics as you need.

You might also create an entry to hold the topics as attachments, so you can quickly find your topic entries. Or you could place your topic entries in a separate journal that represents the more digested information as you progress your research.

Adding Attachments

There are numerous ways to attach entries to other entries, but the main method is using the Basket.

Add to Basket

As you view entries, clicking the "basket plus" button below the entry, adds it to the basket, just like the shopping basket on an online store. Then you can go to the entry where you want to attach entries. At the bottom of the entry you can view the contents of the basket and pick the ones you want to attach.

Recent

Any time you view the basket you can switch it to show Recent entries visited. This is useful because you often want to attach entries you have recently viewed so this saves the step of explicitly adding them to the basket.

Adding to a New Entry from Basket

When viewing the Basket from the NavList, you have the option to create a new parent entry and attach a single or all entries in the basket.

Quoting an Entry

When you are on an entry the Quote button below it will take you to the new entry editor and attach the entry you started from.

New Entry from the Attachments List

If you are already on an entry and you want to add a new entry as child, you can click the New Entry button at the top of the Attachments list and the new entry will be automatically added as a n attachment.