[This was raised in this thread:Basic set up questions for Map project but is moved here to avoid thread drift]
This used to come up very regularly in early Tinderbox days, before the range of views was added. It has never been taken forward as the edge cases are problematic. It can’t be assumed a document is never more than 2 levels deep. If the first two layers are collapsed, how do we know the now-‘flattened’-to-adornment contains container(s). As the levels are collapsed and items on different levels are found to have the same (or close) {x,y} position, how is the new map made clear.
The user may say, “I don’t care, I won’t make a doc like that”, but users still make mistakes and the app would need to know what to do when faced with such challenges.
If you need to flatten nested maps, have you properly considered using treemap view? That flattens one or more nested maps. People often use a Tinderbox map as if it were a drawing tool like Visio or OmniGraffle, which it isn’t. The look is convergent but starts from a different place. As the link thread shows, the more a map view is used as a static infovis drawing tool, generally the more it results in actions that make much of Tinderbox wider toolset harder to use.
There is no right or wrong here and the above is not to push back against the idea. But the idea is definitely a more complex issue than ‘just’ flattening containers into adornments. 