Dolphin - hide blank metadata

Todd Jennings toddrjen at gmail.com
Wed Aug 29 10:26:22 BST 2012


Hi,

My name is Todd, and I am interested in doing some fixes and enhancements
for dolphin.  The first issue I would like to fix, if it isn't fixed
already, is the handling of empty metadata in dolphin's file browser view.
In 4.9.0, when a particular file doesn't have a given metadata item, that
item is listed as a "-" below the file, while still taking up the line.

In my opinion, this limits the usefulness of mimetype-specific metadata
such as "word count" or "image size", since files belonging to a mimetype
that that metadata is not relevant to will still show that blank line.

I see two possible approaches to solving this:

1. restrict that metadata to only files of a valid mimetype.  So, for
example, word count would apply only to text mimetypes.  There are two
problems with this approach.  In this example, not all documents that have
word counts are in the text mimetype, some are in the application mimetype
(like vnd.ms-word).  The second problem is that there is at least possible
relevance of some of these to different mimetypes, for instance the
"orientation" could apply to documents as well as images, and just because
it doesn't do that now doesn't mean it never will.

2. hide empty lines.  So any line for metadata that is not present for a
file will not show up at all.  This avoids the problems with 1.  However,
it has the problem that you can't always tell what metadata might apply to
a file so you can't add it manually.  I don't see this being that much of
an issue, personally.

I prefer approach 2.  It should also be much easier to implement.

However, I don't want to do this if it is already done, or if this change
is opposed by the developers, so I wanted to check first before starting.

Sincerely,
Todd
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