Manage Items Module

Item Hierarchy

See work in context in the Manage Items module by expanding and collapsing the parent–child hierarchy, rather than reading a flat list.

Work in DevStride is organized as a parent–child hierarchy — a parent item contains the items beneath it (for example a deliverable and its tasks, an epic and its stories, or an engagement and its milestones). The Manage Items table can show that structure inline, so you can read work in context instead of as a flat list.

Turning the hierarchy on and off

The hierarchy controls live in the table's control ribbon. The leftmost is the hierarchy toggle — a small tree icon:

Show hierarchy (the tooltip when it's off) — turn it on to display items as a nested tree, with children indented beneath their parents. The button highlights when active.
Hide hierarchy — turn it off to flatten the table back into a plain list that ignores parent–child structure (useful when you just want to sort or scan).

Expanding and collapsing

With the hierarchy on, you can open and close branches two ways.

On a row — when an item has children, an expand control appears next to it. Click it to reveal that item's children (indented by level) or to collapse them again. Children load as you expand, so deep trees stay fast; for a large expansion you'll see an "Expanding items" progress indicator you can cancel.

From the ribbon — four buttons open and close the tree one level at a time, which is handy for large lists:

Button	What it does	Shortcut
Expand row one level	Opens the next level under the active row	`+`
Collapse row one level	Closes the deepest open level under the active row	`-`
Expand all one level	Opens the next level across the whole table	`Shift` + `+`
Collapse all one level	Closes the deepest open level across the whole table	`Shift` + `-`

Either way, you can drill from a top-level item down through several layers of nested work.

Items that appear in more than one place

When the hierarchy is on, a selector next to the toggle controls how an item is shown if it matches both as a top-level row and as a child of another item (which can happen with filters, or when an item is shared across parents):

Children — show it only as a child row (the default).
Primary — show it only as its own top-level row.
Both — show it in both places.

When filters hide part of a tree

Filters and the hierarchy work together. If your filters match a parent but exclude some of its children (or match children whose parent is filtered out), the table shows an indicator that some descendants are hidden by the current filters — so you know the tree you're looking at isn't complete. Clear or adjust the filters to see the full structure.

Why it's useful

Seeing the hierarchy in place makes the cross-project table far more than a list:

A project manager can open a deliverable and immediately see the tasks under it and their status.
A portfolio manager can roll a program up to its top-level items, then expand only the branches worth a closer look.
A team can see how their items ladder up into the bigger picture.

This applies to whatever your items represent — product work, client deliverables, requests, or cases.

Hierarchy is not the same as dependencies

The hierarchy here is parent–child containment (what's part of what). That's different from dependencies — the blocks / depends-on relationships between items. To explore dependencies, see the Dependency Graph; to have dependent dates shift automatically, see Link Mode.

The same hierarchy on boards

The parent–child hierarchy also appears in the Table view on boards, so you can expand and collapse work there as well. See Board & Folder Permissions and the boards documentation for more.

Creating & Sharing Views

Save a filtered, sorted, columned slice of the Manage Items table as a view — keep it private, share it with coworkers, or publish it to external clients via a public link — and understand how permissions work.

Org Configuration

Set up your organization's profile, logo, and workflow automation, and navigate the reorganized Settings area.