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Thanks for clarifying my misunderstanding about the nested graphical search syntax. I think the capability is documented well enough. If anything, this valuable feature may warrant greater attention, possibly through more examples.
Regarding filtered hierarchical views, it occurs to me that what I've been asking for is different from searching for attributes. I want a way to display selected pieces of the database's category structure, aka branches of the hierarchical tree. For instance, my database has three categories: projects, meetings, and notes. "Projects" is further sub-divided into ProjectA, ProjectB, and ProjectC. I'd like to create a view that shows project items with a red or blue flag. If there are no such items for a given project, I need not see an empty set. But for items that meet these specs, I want to see the entire relevant category structure. That is, item, sub-category (projectA, projectB, etc.), and category (Projects).
The concept here is "inheritance," and I'm thinking about how views were handled by Lotus Agenda, a PIM that I lived in for years, but ultimately had to abandon. In Agenda, categories inherited the properties of their elements. That is, properties of child categories are assigned automatically to their parents, but not vice-versa. So, properties of a meeting assigned to projectA are also assigned to projectA and to projects. However, properties of the project category are not automatically assigned to sub-categories or items within sub-categories.
To answer your question directly, a filtered data explorer would show all the selected items, along with the parents of these items, and the parents of these parents, etc. -- all the way up to the highest level, "my data." What it wouldn't show are the empty sets, such as the un-selected siblings of first-level parents -- for instance, projectB, its child categories and items.
A category-based view could be displayed in the related items pane rather than the data explorer, provided that the elements of the category structure were treated like attributes, and sorting included headings. That procedure would create a view of the explorer window without supplanting the explorer's being, in essence, a "show all" view.
Paul
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