[Nepomuk] Dolphin: Improved search interface

[Sebastian Trüg]

On 07/27/2010 10:51 AM, Peter Penz wrote:
> BTW: If it is OK for you, I'd suggest that for further discussions we move to 
> nepomuk at kde.org, so that we can get also other opinions.

Done now. More below.

> On Tuesday 27 July 2010 10:44:28 Alessandro Sivieri wrote:
>>>> it is very cool that you combined the GUI for Nepomuk and kfind search.
>>>> I wanted to do the exact same.

>>>> Here is what I envision:
>>>>
>>>> I want the facets to work in any listed folder. This includes query
>>>> folders themselves, timeline folders, local folders, and even ftp
>>>> folders. For this to work Dolphin cannot be responsible for storing the
>>>> state of the facets.
>>>
>>> ok
>>>
>>>> This is something the KIO slaves have to
>>>> communicate. I thought about this quite a lot - so far without the
>>>> "perfect" solution. But I get the feeling that the best approach would
>>>> be to introduce a UDS_NEPOMUK_QUERY which contains the query that can be
>>>> used to list the entries in the folder. Then the facets widget (this is
>>>> a component that should be generic and in kdelibs - Oszkar is working on
>>>> that) could examine the query and extract as many facets from it as
>>>> possible. The facets would then be displayed as selections in the gui
>>>
>>> Could you elaborate a little bit, what you mean with "selections in the
>>> gui"?

By "selection in the gui" I mean checkboxes or selection buttons of some
kind, i.e. facets.

Imagine a query from timline: it contains ComparisonTerms for the
modification time (among others). This could be extracted from the query
and displayed as a checkbox "yesterday" or "custom date range". All in
all it should try to show as much of the query as facets while the rest
is kept internally as a custom query part. The user should always be
able to clear the latter with a single click and only use the facets.

>>>> while the rest of the query would be shown as "Custom query" at the top.
>>>
>>> ok
>>>
>>>> A bit of optimization could go into that GUI by extending the generic
>>>> query extraction so queries done from within Dolphin can be shown in
>>>> better detail.
>>>> The nice thing here is that I can browse timeline:/ and then restrict
>>>> the mimetypes in there, do a full text search, and so on.
>>>
>>> Yes, this would be very nice!
>>>
>>>> And all this would still be combined with the kfind-style engine which
>>>> is automagically used for remote folders like ftp (and non-indexed
>>>> folders in case there is a folder restriction).
>>>
>>> What do you mean with the "kfind-style engine"?

Non-Nepomuk based search as you implemented already. Simply running
through all files and testing the conditions. We can still use mtime,
filename, and mimetype here. We would simply not show the advanced
facets for folders that are not local (file://) or not provide a
UDS_NEPOMUK_QUERY.

>>>> I am pretty sure that I forgot half of what I wanted to say since Clara
>>>> rushed in any gave me a children's tatoo.... but nonetheless the
>>>> discussion is started.
>>>
>>> Great :-) One question though: Are there any rough schedules for the
>>> facets widgets to get them into kdelibs? The background of my question
>>> is whether it
>>> will be reasonable to get this in for 4.6 before the beta phase?

We NEED to get this into 4.6. Actually I would like to get it done in
August or September. We are not that far from finishing it.

>>>>> On trunk I just committed an improved search interface for Dolphin
>>>>> like explained on
>>>>> http://ppenz.blogspot.com/2010/07/search-improvements.html

Cheers,
Sebastian