Apologies if this has been addressed in another topic, I searched but couldn’t find any info on it.
I’d like to keep my collections list manageable, but it’s starting to get very long and scrolly. Is there any way to archive old collections, so that you could still access them on demand but they don’t appear in the Collections list? For example, in DITA you can save a lot of different ditamaps (TOCs) and open them at any time, but they don’t appear in the editor (I use Oxygen) unless you choose to open them.
Not at the moment, at least in a manner that will allow for restoration of that archived list back into a collection. You can achieve a sort of binder-based collection list already by creating a new item meant to store that list, and dragging the entire collection list into its References pane in the inspector.
I find it easiest to use a split view since selecting the collection list will replace the editor and thus the card you created to hold these items as references. If you leave that item in the other split, then after selecting the collection list you can click back into the other split to load the references pane you need and drag and drop from the binder sidebar.
What is missing at the moment is the ability to drag a bunch of references into a collection list to add the referred to items to that collection—hence restoring the “backup”.
If you’re content in knowing that once 3.0 is available you’ll be able to restore these lists to a collection, and knowing that as references they can still be used to do much of what collections can already do, then you could consider “archiving” them for now.
If you’re not too concerned about the order of your items, you can manage collection archiving and restoration via Project Keywords. They’re accessed in a hierarchical control, so you can add any number of them to a collapsible Archived Collections branch.
Just multi-select the items in your collection and drag the keyword onto the set. Even after you’ve deleted the collection, you’ll be able to bring up the same set as Search Results from the Keywords control. Then of course you can multi-select the Search Results and move the items back into a collection, though most likely in a different order than before.
Thanks, Jerome! That’s a good idea but the order of topics in a collection is what I’m trying to archive (different versions of organizing various poetry manuscripts), so that wouldn’t quite work. I use keywords pretty extensively in other ways though, that feature is so helpful
