Monsters should be able to be grouped and order themselves based on the groups

[BryceDMonaco]

Selected monsters should be able to be placed into a group. i.e. If I have six goblins (named "Goblin A", "Goblin B", ... , "Goblin F") I should be able to select Goblin A, Goblin C, and Goblin D and group them into a group called "Cave 1" (indicating that these goblins are in an area called "Cave 1". These goblins should rearrange themselves to be put together, all other goblins should be before or after the group. Unordered goblins are technically in their own hidden group until actually grouped.

[BryceDMonaco]

Need to consider how to do this.

My original plan was to insert a new cell into the list which contained its own ListView, this new cell would represent a group and all monsters in that group would be shown on the nested ListView inside of it. Turns out, you can only have one cell factory defined and cannot swap between multiple. If I would like to keep this idea, I will need to find a way to switch between cell types, maybe make the entire root list a ListView<Monster[]> instead of ListView and, if the array only contains one monster, do the default single monster cell, and, if the array contains more than one monster, this is considered a group and should be displayed as a nested ListView.

• Pros: Looks nicer in the GUI; clear way to show groups
• Cons: Will probably need to have one controller file for two FXML files (the group view and the base monster cell), which can get tricky; will need somewhat large refactor of existing monster GUI code if the array switch is done, maybe a list? (note that a list would not make refactoring easier, but it could make future work easier)

Potential less messy solution, decorator approach, however I do not think this is directly applicable to this issue. Maybe have the GroupView factory reference the single monster factory, and, if the array is only one, just get the cell from the single monster factory. In this approach, the groupview factory would be the default, and we would still need to change to ListView<Monster[]>.

Another solution would be to keep the existing single monster cells and add another field where the user could assign a group. This would likely be an editable combobox, where the user could select from any existing groups or type in their own and assign it, any custom added group names would be selectable from other monsters, which would be tricky to implement, but not too bad, just have each Monster object reference the same shared list. Monsters would be ordered in the ListView by group name, monsters not assigned to a group would still technically be in one big group in terms of sorting.

• Pros: Much less code refactoring, quicker to implement
• Cons: Personally I think the Monster cell is already pretty crowded with information and it would be hard to squeeze something else in. A potential solution could be to add another side button where you select the monsters and hit "Group" to bring up a mass selection combo box, but that feels a little clunky and unintuitive. Another would be to redesign the layout of the monster cell.

For reference:
Current MonsterCell design:

GroupView mockup: