Directory Views

Directory Settings > Directory Views

As an administrator for a directory, use this page to define views for your users:

Views represent a definition of how the records should be organized for your users. For example, most elementary schools will want to define a “Classroom” view, whereas a middle school might want a view by “Homeroom” and a view by “Grade”.

For your convenience, after you import some records into your directory for the first time, we will automatically create two views for you:

1. Classroom: This default view organizes students and non-students (e.g., teachers, room parents) by classroom.

2. Classroom (Printable): This is another view of students and non-students by classroom that is suitable for printing for paper distribution.

You can edit these auto-created views and/or create additional views for your directory. You must have at least 1 view defined and designated as the default. When users navigate to the home page for your directory, they will be shown the default view but can select a different view if desired. (Note: you must import some records before defining your first view)

If our auto-created views don’t quite work for your school, then defining views is probably the most complicated thing you’ll do in Directory Burst. But relax! We’ll walk you through a basic example here, and it’ll soon become easy. In this example, we’ll describe how to create a view by “Grade”.

1. Start by clicking the Create New View button. You will see the following pop-up:

1. On the first page of the pop-up, give your view a name. In our example, let’s call it “Grade”. Decide whether or not to make this view your default.

2. Next, designate how you want to organize records into the view. The Primary Grouping indicates the top-level organization for this view. In our example, because we want to organize records by grade, we will select “Grade” as the Primary Grouping, and we’ll choose to display them in Ascending order (so grade 1 appears before grade 4).

3. The Secondary Grouping is a little more advanced. It is allows you to specify how to organize the records within a list. For example, in our directory, we may have loaded students, teachers, room parents, and administrators (designated in the “Role” field). When showing the list of records in a grade, we might want the teachers and room parents to be separated from the students, which can be accomplished with the Secondary Grouping. In our example, we'll select “Role” as the Secondary Grouping. Because we want “Students” to appear before “Others”, we will display this grouping in Descending order.

   1. Click Next to proceed with your view definition. You will see the next page in the pop-up:

1. On this second page of the pop-up, enter descriptions for all of the unique values in your primary and secondary groupings. These descriptions will be displayed to end users of your directory, rather than the raw values from your data import file. For example, by providing a description, you can display “1 - First Grade” for end users to see instead of just the raw value of “1” from your import file.

2. Note: in your Secondary Grouping, you can enter the same description multiple times if you wish. Doing so allows you to group similar types of records together. In our example, you may want to separate Students from everybody else in the classroom. However, because there are typically only a few teachers and room parents in a grade, you do not want to separate those records into their own sub-sections. Hence, you can enter “Students” as your description for all student records. But for the role of “Teacher” and “Room Parent”, you can enter the same description of “Others”, which will group those records together into a single section for your end users.

3. Click Next to proceed with your view definition. You will see the final page in the pop-up:

1. On this final pop-up page, indicate what fields should be displayed when listing records to your end-users. You will see a section to designate Display Fields for each of your unique Secondary Grouping values. For each section that appears, simply use the arrows to move the values that you wish to display from the Available Fields section into Display Fields. You can also use the up / down arrows to rearrange the order of display fields. Finally, you should select 1 or more fields to be used for in sorting records (use the Add Another Field button to add multiple sort fields).

2. In our example, we might indicate that for “Students”, we wish to display: First Name, Last Name, Parent 1 Name, Parent 2 Name, and Primary Phone on list pages. And, we first want to sort ascending by “Last Name” and then sort ascending by “First Name” in case 2 students have the same last name (so “Charlie Smith appears before “Jill Smith”).

3. (Optional) As an advanced option, you will notice options for “(New Line)” and “(Blank)” in the Available Fields section. We’ve provided these options as a way to break the listing of a record into multiple lines, which is valuable if you are trying to display lots of fields in the list. For example, if you want to display multiple parent names and email addresses in the list view, the large number of columns will look poor on a web page and in especially in the RTF export file for printing if displayed in a single row. “New Line” allows you to insert another row for a record. “Blank” allows you to add a blank value into any column so you can get columns to line up properly.

4. For example, in order to put the name and email of parent 2 in a second row directly under parent 1, you would specify the following Display Fields:

5. First Name, Last Name, Grade, Parent 1 Name, Parent 1 Email, (New Line), (Blank), (Blank), (Blank), Parent 2 Name, Parent 2 Email.

6. Click the Save button when finished defining your new view.

Again, take heart that defining your first view may feel a little complicated, but don’t get too frustrated. Give it a try and then go view your directory to see how it looks. With a little trial-and-error, you’ll have an awesome looking view defined in no time at all!