Search Indicators in Dolphin

[Frank Reininghaus]

Hi Vishesh,

sorry for the late reply. I was at a friend's wedding, which involved
quite a bit of travelling.

2013/5/29 Vishesh Handa <me at vhanda.in>:
> Hey Frank
>
> I've been trying to figure out how to schedule the indexing of the files.
> Currently, it only indexes the contents of the file when idle. This
> obviously doesn't work in all cases as many users will not be leaving their
> system idle.
>
> So, when users try to search, it does not give them the correct results and
> that leads them to believe that nepomuk is not working.
>
> One way of fixing this is by always indexing the files and adding
> appropriate delays so that the user is not bothered, and that is what I am
> going to do for 4.11. However, until the indexing has been completed we
> still have the same problem.
>
> The proper way to fix this would be to have some kind of "indexing progress"
> bar which is shown to the user when they try to search.

Well, we do have signals "directoryLoadingProgress(int)" and
"directorySortingProgress(int)" in KFileItemModel, which result in a
notification in the status bar, but I guess that these are not really
suitable for the case that indexing the home folder will take a few
hours ;-)

> So, if the user tries to search through a folder which is marked for
> indexing and still not indexed, it will say "These files are currently being
> indexed. The search results may not be complete" and it will show a progress
> bar, and maybe even try to approximate the amount of time the indexing will
> take.
>
> Would you be okay with something like this in Dolphin? I'm imagining
> something like the KMessageWidget, but with a progress bar. [1]

I'm not sure how useful such a progress bar would be. If indexing the
home folder takes a few hours, it's not very likely that the user will
watch the progress bar proceed to its end and leave the search
untouched in the mean time, I think.

An alternative might be to just use the "filenamesearch" kioslave if
the indexing is not finished yet and possibly show a message informing
the user about that and providing an estimate of the remaining time
until the indexing is finished.

> Also, maybe it would be nice that if the user tries to search through a
> folder which is not indexed, a message widgets appears which says that this
> folder is not indexed, and therefore searching will be slow, and then gives
> the user the option to index the folder.

Well, searching something in ~ and its subfolders is probably quite a
common case, but OTOH, indexing ~ might take quite a bit of time, so I
wonder how useful such an option would be?

Best regards,
Frank