Tool Tips for Layers and Fields

[ChrisAnderson]

I would like to be able to hover my mouse over a layer in the table of contents or a field in the attribute table and have a tool tip pop up with a description. A layer already has a description associated with it and it would be easy to allow quick viewing by just hovering over the layer in the table of contents instead of always opening up the properties to see.

The field would need a description associated with it (other than the Alias attribute) that you could type more of a description of what the field is or used for. The Alias limits you becuase if I have a lot of characters the field has to be streched in order to view the entire name. I would like to to prevent the user from having to change the field width and just hover over the field name. A descriptive tool tip would allow for over 100-200 characters and make it easier for a user to know what a field is.

Again the Alias is fine for short one/two word descriptions, but i would like to be aloud more of a sentance to a paragraph sized description. A tool tip would solve this.

Example datasets this would be useful for would be the soils and census dataset.
 

[JurajKrumpolec]

Yes. Something like TOC Infotips in Advanced TOC Visual Interface idea.

[DuncanHornby]

I think this is a good idea but consideration should be given to where this description is held? For example Shapefiles do not support aliases, geodatabases do. So this would require an alteration to the geodatabase structure to be able to support it.

An alternate location would be the metadata so a shapefile could support it. Store the field description in the metadata and make arcmap smarter so it can read from it.  I've suggested this idea before; make Arcmap smarter and take changes to field name alias held in the metadata to update table view apperances.

[EvanThoms]

Yes!, like Hornbydd says, store it in and read it from the metadata.