Brad,

Your Bug Report is a Dynamic Application, and since it's not one we include with our default template, I can't be sure of what fields or views you have configured.  However, when you say you want to view a collection of records, you simply need to specify how that collection is defined.  Once you determine what attribute defines the collection, you can use the Search option to filter the view to include only those records that meet the criteria.

If the Bug Report is configured to be a global application, you have much more flexibility to define custom views for filtering and grouping records.

I wouldn't say folder views are useless, as they provide a intuitive, graphical way to organize records within an application, making it very easy to browse for items.  As an option for defining custom views they are not necessarily that important, but that is not their primary purpose.

If you can share more about what your custom view requirements are, including the fields you use in your Bug Report records, it will be easier to suggest ways to accomplish what you are trying to do.

Thanks for the quick reply.  Our Bug Report currently has 17 different fields that can be configured when generating a report; most of these I'm not actively concerned with.  Because the particular project I'm working on has several different software components, we decided to organize the bugs for these various software components by placing them into different folders.

So, the first thing I want to do is isolate the bugs for the software component I'm currently working on.  This is easy as I just select 'Folder View' and click on the desired folder.  But, the problem comes about when I only want to see 5 or 6 fields within this Folder View.  This is because if I select another view I'm no longer in the 'Folder View', meaning I can now see my desired fields, but they are no longer within the context of the folder I'm interested in.

I can obviously work around this by creating a 'Software Component' field and specifying it in my Custom View, but then the Folder designation becomes redundant because it means the same thing as the new field I'm creating.  In order to be able to view things in a folder view, I'd have to both specify the folder (Software Component x), then specify the newly created field so I can use it in my custom view (Software Component x).

This is why I say it becomes useless, what I should have said is redundant.  Obviously you could still use it to see all of the bugs within a particular folder, but you get the exact same thing, plus custom fields, by just making it another fields.  The only thing the Folder View gives you is the graphical reference on the left side of the screen.

Let me know if I'm off here, I'm still playing around with the options.

You're not off.  These two functions serve similar purposes, but with very different possibilities.

In this case, I'd recommend you add a custom field to the Bug Report to denote which software component is affected by the bug.  This makes it much easier to create custom views and reports, plus if you ever decide to create a web form for your dynamic application it can be set in the webform, where the folder cannot.

Genenerally speaking, using custom fields to define the attributes of any type of record will be more inherently useful for more purposes.