Re: Beagle in GtkFileChooser

[Federico Mena Quintero <federico ximian com>]

On Wed, 2005-05-04 at 16:51 +0100, Adam Lofts wrote:

> I'm starting to intergrate beagle into the gtk filechooser widget. My
> initial idea is to do a beagle search when the "interactive search
> typing thing" has no matches and add these onto the file-list
> treeview, selecting the top one.

You'll be interested in these:

Proposal for file chooser extensions:
http://primates.ximian.com/~federico/docs/file-chooser-extension-spec/index.html

Mailing list thread:
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gtk-devel-list/2004-September/msg00072.html

A quick summary of the conversation is this:

1. I could only think of three extensions to the file chooser
(searching, metadata, and lock-down).  People had trouble thinking of
other possible extensions --- does this mean that we should not use a
generic extension mechanism, but rather integrate things like searching
directly in the file chooser's API?

2. The draft spec says that extensions should just specify a
"GtkFileChooserModel" to replace the default file list.  Maybe we need
to completely replace the file list with another widget:  what if Beagle
wants to show its search results with the same widget used by Best.

3. The search results should be only things to which you can get via a
URI.  For example, it doesn't make sense for the file chooser to list
Evolution mails that match the search terms, since you can't get to mail
messages via URIs.

In any case, it's great that you are working on this!  Feel free to ask
me about implementation issues within GtkFileChooser at any time.

  Federico