Organizing Properties

In many situations, the Project Table can contain a large number of properties. Maestro provides a number of tools for organizing these properties, so that you can show only the ones that are relevant to the current task and hide the rest, or find particular properties.

Properties are classified into groups, or families, according to the application that generated them. Within each property family, the properties are classified into primary and secondary properties, each of which is also considered a family. If you want to organize properties into families that suit your own purposes, you can do so in the Manage Custom Families Panel, which allows you to create, edit, and delete custom families.

Showing and Hiding Properties

There are several ways to show or hide properties in the Project Table.

You can show or hide properties by using the Show button menu on the Property toolbar.

The options available to you are:

All—Show all project properties.
None—Hide all project properties. Only the Row, In, and Title columns remain visible.
Primary Only—Show only the primary properties of each property family, and hide the secondary properties.
For Selected Entries—Show only the properties that have values for one or more of the selected entries, and hide all other properties.
Select—Select the properties to show. Opens the Show Properties Dialog Box, in which you can choose the properties to show.

You can show and hide properties, and find properties, using the Project Table — Property Tree Panel, which you can open with Window → Property Tree or the Tree button on the Property toolbar.

This panel is docked to the right of the properties in the table by default.

The tree is organized by families, with one node for each family, and nodes underneath it for the primary and secondary properties, with properties sorted alphabetically under each node. Click on the turner arrow to show or hide the next level. If you want to expand or collapse all branches of the tree, right-click on the All row and choose Expand or Collapse.To show only properties from a specific family, select the family, then right-click on it and choose Show Only.

To show or hide any property or any group of properties (a property family, or the primary or secondary properties of a family), click the appropriate check box. If a group of properties has some but not all of its properties shown (checked), the check box is half filled, to indicate that the group is incompletely shown.

To show or hide multiple properties in one action, first select the properties using the usual click, shift-click, control-click actions for list selection, then right-click in the selection and choose from the available actions. The available actions depend on whether the selected properties are shown or hidden.

Since properties can belong to more than one family, when you select a property or a group of properties to be shown, other groups or properties can be selected. For example, selecting the secondary family for Glide also selects the Glide Residue Interactions family, because this family is a subset of Glide secondary properties.

The properties that are shown in the tree can be filtered, by entering the text you want to match in the search text box. This text can include wildcard characters: * to match any number of characters, ? to match a single character; and it can include character sets enclosed in square brackets, such as [a-z]. Filtering is done as you type, and the tree displays only the nodes that contain properties that match the filter. To show the full tree again, click the clear (X) button at the right side of the text box.

Several other actions for showing or hiding properties are available from the button menu to the right of the search text box. Click the button to display the menu:

The actions you can perform are:

Return to Previous State—Undo the last change made to the visibility of the properties, returning the Project Table to the state before the last change.
Hide All—Hide all project properties. Only the Row, In, and Title columns remain visible.
Hide Empty—Hide properties that do not have any values for any entry.
Maestro Defaults—Show the default set of properties. This is essentially a "reset" operation that returns the state to Maestro's default set of shown properties.
All Properties in Selected Entries—Show only the properties that have values for one or more of the selected entries, and hide all other properties.
Manage Custom Families—Create, edit, and delete custom property families. Opens the Manage Custom Families Panel.

Even after hiding many properties, the property you want to examine might not be shown in the part of the table that is in view. To bring the property into view, double-click on the property in the property tree. You can do this for a hidden property: it becomes shown and the table scrolls to the property.

Rearranging Property Columns

To move a property column, you can

Drag the column header to the desired location. This works for moving properties between the fixed area and the scrolling area as well as within these areas.
Use the Move To item on the shortcut menu for the column, and select the location from the submenu. If a choice of a property is needed to complete the move, a property selector opens so you can choose the property.
Choose Table → Change Columns → Reorder and make the desired changes in the order of the properties in the Reorder Properties Dialog Box. You can also open this dialog box from the Columns button menu on the Property toolbar.

Columns that are moved to the fixed area are placed after the standard fixed columns. The order of the Row, In, and Title columns cannot be changed, but you can move the Stars column to the right or left of the Title column using the shortcut menu.