[Feature] Allow sorting of atlas columns

[PolarBean]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
I have many many brainglobe atlases installed. In the UI this can make it difficult to select the one I am interested in.

Describe the solution you'd like
The ability to filter by text, searching ideally many fields but at first just atlas name.

[adamltyson]

@alessandrofelder is the filtering only available in the atlas installation widget? If so, it should be easy to copy across right?

Also linked to #22

[alessandrofelder]

Yep should be easy to carry across (ideally avoiding duplicate code as much as possible).

Think we didn't originally because we expected most users to only need few atlases and it keeps the UX simpler. But maybe it is useful for more people than we thought?

[PolarBean]

haha true maybe installing all the atlases is a bit of an internal problem

[alessandrofelder]

The ability to sort by column alphabetically would be nice to add to at least the atlas installation widget (or maybe both to help people with lots of atlases too?) and would avoid the extra GUI element?

[IgorTatarnikov]

If brainglobe/brainglobe-atlasapi#688 is merged, I think they'll be sorted alphabetically by default for all widgets fetching the atlases

[alessandrofelder]

Nice!

I was thinking you might also want to sort e.g. by the species column to group by species in the future :)

[IgorTatarnikov]

Good point! Didn't think about sorting by other metadata fields as well.

[Vedant936-ai]

Hello . I am Vedant and I made the PR #688 . I saw the tagged msg there . Based on the discussions here I understand there is need of sorting for all widgets , fetching the atlases . Please let me know is there anything specific I should contribute to it .

[alessandrofelder]

A filtering search bar (very useful on the atlas manager side for our ~200 atlases) on the atlas viewer side continues to feel like overkill UI to me if I am correct in my assumption that the vast majority of our users only ever download 2-3 atlases.

I think we should add the sorting functionality to both the AtlasManagerView and the AtlasViewerView.
I imagine this to be minimal UI: something like clicking on the column header would sort the table by that column. (so this can be extended to arbitrary metadata columns we might add in the future)

I would expect the technical implementation of this to refactor and re-use the existing QSortFilterProxyModel from the AtlasManagerView class.

@brainglobe/active-devs are encouraged to disagree with the above - for now I will update the issue title accordingly.

[adamltyson]

i can see some semi-regular use cases for more than 2-3 atlases. I would agree that most users will only use 2-3 to process data, but in this case it's for visualisation. I could imagine researchers/educators wanting to create slides from 10-20 atlases to illustrate comparative differences between species/ages. If they use 10-20 atlases, they may download 100 to find the ones they need!

[HARSHDIPSAHA]

Thanks for your clarification @alessandrofelder , I agree that adding this search bar introduces more complexity in the UI . I also agree with @adamltyson point here and was thinking in similar direction thats why I was working on this 😅.
So how would you like me to proceed with this work? To move forward, can I proceed with implementing column sorting only for now ?

[Vedant936-ai]

I believe as this issue was tagged on my PR previously #688 should I work on it or someone else is working on it is ok