Make category choice hierarchical

Categories are required because the expert is tied to the category. If you can think of some other way to know which expert is to get the question, feel free to discuss it.

The "suggest a category" feature might be useful for you.

Good point! I was thinking too narrow.

I have many terms at various levels which makes both the expert choosing and choosing of a category for the user difficult but necessary for properly organizing. This may be just a PITA an not worth it, but it may be good to allow admin to decide which terms to tie an expert to and thus show in the dropdown. Thus, the admin could choose the to show the higher level parent terms making it easier for the user to choose a category and identifing the expert to notify. Then upon answering the question, the expert could properly categorize it if necessary.

For example it may only be necessary for the user to choose "Cars" as the category instead of having to look through 15 subterms if the same expert is assigned. This could be confusing for some but a little help text for the admin would clarify this.

If a category does not have an expert, it will not show in the drop down selector list. So I think this now comes down to the hierarchy question: http://drupal.org/node/231208 I'm going to mark the other as a duplicate and lets continue that discussion here.

There are two places where the hierarchy might be shown: 1) the selector on "Ask a question", and 2) the expert assignment settings page. My first thought is that the end user asking a question probably doesn't give a hoot about the hierarchy, but I could be wrong. The admin setting up the experts probably does care.

However, assuming that the end user does care, we have a problem in that the hierarchy has not been preserved in the experts table. I'm not sure, at the moment, how to recreate that hierarchy. Suggestions are welcome.

The next problem is with the expert settings. Right now, that table can flip based on whether there are more terms or experts. I think, in order to show the hierarchy, I'm going to have to always have the terms to be on the left and experts across the top, regardless of how many there are. This could get into a real-estate issue if the user names are long or many. I could partially resolve that by making the user names vertical if needed (see the picture near the bottom of this page.

While it would be nice to have the ability to view the hierarchy on both the expert screen as well as the selector on "Ask a question", I think that this could be solved second. The first step could be to add a check box next to the terms that are available for experts and to show in the selector. That is, only the selected terms will be processed for expert notification and viewable in the selector. What do you think?

As far as the table, it is fine. If a lot of experts are added then the table will get large but I really don't see a slick way around this that justifies the effort. In fact, I just downloaded a module that has a huge table and it simply stretches out across the theme if you have a lot of nodetypes(http://drupal.org/project/filterbynodetype). Looks bad but it works for an admin. I will look around at other modules to see if there are some examples of hierarchy to follow for the expert table.

See also #318861: Category select doesn't consider weights.

don't think huge tables should be a problem for administrators, try out permission table with several roles and long names like "one month free trial member" an such descriptive names (which BTW I avoid at all costs)
OTH the hierarchy issue don't follow (haven't reviewed the code) why is such a problem to "recreate" hierarchy since it's a vocabulary of taxonomy module.
For usability I'm thinking about a hierarchical vocabulary which can be limited to 1, 2, X deep to be viewed by the end user, and a table for assigning terms to experts (maybe with a checkbox to be recursive from some term down the hierarchy)
crossing roles with term will be a huge table, but check out the workflow module and it's table for assigning transitions to roles, what wrong with it? seems fine to me.

@NathanRAFT: you might be interested in #308881: Category.

@arhak: There are changes being discussed for D7 which make me want to avoid a really wide table if possible.

well, it's possible, this issue doesn't seems to me a major issue of your module

PS:

There are changes being discussed for D7 which make me want to avoid a really wide table if possible.

I'm not pleased to hear about that, since wide tables will be always required (for other modules)

In another module I am working with scroll bars, so that may be useful here as well.

I use on my website, 2 vocabularies for FAQ. The problem is that the FAQ_ASk form is displaying terms ordered by alphabetic name from my 2 vocabularies If I had only one vocabulary it's not a big deal, but with 2 or more it's really confusing for the user who see mixed terms from several vocabularies...

Please try the version 2 code.