[Find Window]: improve usability for fairly complex query

[emitrax]

As for now, if an user, totally unfamiliar with Haiku/BeOS and the tracker, would like to make a query such as

• find all files created/modified after 8 o'clock of today (or ten days ago)
• find all files created this week bigger than 700MB
• find all files created in the last ten minutes

and so on, would have not idea about the input format of both size and date, a part from the fact that she probably wouldn't know that she had to click on "by attribute" to make such queries (or even that such as queries are possible).

The idea is to make this more obvious and easy to do. In order to so I'd like to propose to

• Remove the "by attribute" entry from the second menu from the left
• Add a little arrow with an "advanced" label on its side that when clicked would enlarge the find window by adding the following rows Date
  • [radioButton=before] [inputwidget]year [inputwidget]month (etc. to minutes) [AND|OR]
  • [radioButton=after] ...same as above without the AND|OR Size
  • [radioButton=bigger than] [spinBox] Mb[AND|OR]
  • [radioButton=smaller than] [spinBox] Mb

The AND|OR option would be editable only if both radioButton of the section (date|size) are selected. This way the user can very easily look for file created at any time of any size.

As for the size, by default it should be set on 1 Mb, if the user would like to look for a smaller file, the label would turn into Kb and the number would start from 1024 (same for bigger than 1024 MB -> 1GB, or smaller than 1KB -> 1024 Bytes).

That's it. This would cover most of the query an user would like to do and the "by formula" option would cover the rest for very advanced user.

I hope I made myself clear. Please comment.

[oruizdorantes]

+1 I Never remember how to use those attributes, There might be another ticket around to add nonBFS volumes search...

[humdinger]

Maybe you should turn this into a thread on the mailing list for discussion.

I'm not sure losing the "by attribute" search is the right way to go. Searching specific attributes is a key feature of our queries. Also, I'm not sure limiting searches to date and size is a common usage pattern of the average user. IMHO, a user is often looking for this music track, that picture or text file or some video etc. So, access to these catgories should be as quick as possible. Probably by default best without regard to the exact filetype (JPEG, GIF, PNG) but the supertype (image/*).

My totally undeveloped suggestion is to have 1) Live result window: as soon as you enter information, the result window (integrated in the find panel) shows the results. Often the list of hits shortens quickly enough so you don't have to come up with more specific search criteria.

2) A filter widget above every displayed attribute column of the results. This is where your idea with date and size comes in. By e.g. in/decreasing the spinbox of the size column, you filter out the bigger/smaller files (needs an additional radiobutton-setting: bigger/smaller, before/after, is/not). The same goes for date. Or picture dimension. Or Artist, with a filter-textbox.

[emitrax]

Replying to humdinger:

Maybe you should turn this into a thread on the mailing list for discussion.

I'm not sure losing the "by attribute" search is the right way to go. Searching specific attributes is a key feature of our queries. Also, I'm not sure limiting searches to date and size is a common usage pattern of the average user. IMHO, a user is often looking for this music track, that picture or text file or some video etc. So, access to these catgories should be as quick as possible. Probably by default best without regard to the exact filetype (JPEG, GIF, PNG) but the supertype (image/*).

We already have that thanks to the "Category" menu (top-left IIRC).

My totally undeveloped suggestion is to have 1) Live result window: as soon as you enter information, the result window (integrated in the find panel) shows the results. Often the list of hits shortens quickly enough so you don't have to come up with more specific search criteria.

Hmmm... It's not a bad idea, but I see it as a further enhancement.

2) A filter widget above every displayed attribute column of the results. This is where your idea with date and size comes in. By e.g. in/decreasing the spinbox of the size column, you filter out the bigger/smaller files (needs an additional radiobutton-setting: bigger/smaller, before/after, is/not). The same goes for date. Or picture dimension. Or Artist, with a filter-textbox.

Again, a further enhancement IMHO.

[waddlesplash]

John & Jessica did a lot of work on Tracker's Find window, it's much easier to use now. Humdinger, thoughts?

[humdinger]

I still think there's much room for improvement. I do think however, that ticket #9781 describes a more important direction (well, it's my ticket after all :) )

There's also an old posting on the website, that may still give some inspiration: ​Improved Find Panel.

[pulkomandy]

KDE has some interesting work on parsing "natural language" queries and generating query string from those (for Nepomuk or Baloo): ​http://steckdenis.be/post-2013-09-25-the-end-of-the-google-summer-of-code.html

Maybe some of this code could be reused?