Review Request 130179: Improve usability of "Open With" dialog by adding option to filter the application tree

[Simone Gaiarin]

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This is an automatically generated e-mail. To reply, visit:
https://git.reviewboard.kde.org/r/130179/
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(Updated July 12, 2017, 4:50 p.m.)


Review request for KDE Frameworks.


Summary (updated)
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Improve usability of "Open With" dialog by adding option to filter the application tree


Bugs: 359233
    https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=359233


Repository: kio


Description
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The current "open with" dialog implementation does not follow the KDE principle "Simple by default, powerful when needed" for the following reasons:
- The current primary goal of the lineedit is to type in a command. Indeed when start typing a drop-down list with command auto-completion appears.

Usability problems:
- The mentioned drop-down list covers the application tree
- It's not possible to search in the application tree, so to find a software it is necessary to guess the category every time


My patch changes the behavior as follow:

Simple by default:
- The primary goal of the lineedit is to be a search box that allows to filter the applications in the tree
- The command auto-completion is disabled by default

Powerful when needed
- The command autocompletion can be turned on by advanced users by selecting the preferred autocompletion mode in the right click context menu of the lineedit (this behavior is quite hidden, and I guess most of the normal users don't even know it's possible (I didn't know it until I dig into the code))


Implementation details:
- The application tree filtering is achieved using a subclass of QSortFilterProxyModel
- When 3 characters are typed in the search box all the tree is expanded (there should be few matching entries at this point)
- When the 3rd character is deleted all the tree is collapsed
- In order to be able to filter, it's necessary to fetch all the tree nodes when the model is created, and not on demand as it was before. This is achieved by adding a fetchAll method. Maybe there is a more elegant way.

I've tested the implementation, but I'm pretty sure I haven't covered all the possible cases, so a careful testing is necessary.

Relevant discussions:
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=359233
https://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?f=285&t=131014


Diffs
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  src/widgets/kopenwithdialog.cpp b28c5b05186bc77413524c99ef61b7967b0ec8b9 
  src/widgets/kopenwithdialog_p.h 52e1bf4febcd5085a12769fc5e9fd614cb490dd6 

Diff: https://git.reviewboard.kde.org/r/130179/diff/


Testing
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With and without some text in the line edit:
- Double click on category opens it
- Double click on entry launches the software
- Remember program association for mime works
- Run in terminal works
- Keep open terminal works


Thanks,

Simone Gaiarin

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