Re: Beagle-query and dates

["Kevin Kubasik" <kevin kubasik net>]

I defiantly like this idea, I think we need to address a few quick
things about how it would be done.

1) We need an advanced query interface, thats the best way to do it. I
know this has been on a wish list forever, maybe next SoC we can ask
for it... ( I think theres enough new features in the works as is, and
if we get the cool metadata/rdf stuff figured out in the next few
months, then they could/would be a definite boon to anyone looking to
help build an interface for more advanced queries.
    a) A sub-question here, adding just date spans to queries wouldn't
be too hard (from an interface perspective) if we have/had a calendar
control. I know Windows Forms has one, and I seem to remember during a
short stint of gtkmm work Gtk::Calendar being an autocomplete option,
I dunno if its utility stuff or a Calendar control, but if anyone
knows if its available in the current gtk# (and stable) then I
wouldn't mind looking into it. (I know I'm building up quite a todo
list I'm hoping to just hammer them hard one night in the near future
once I get net)

2)  We already have the most recent modified event and/or creation
time stored in most cases, however it would be cool to somehow keep a
record of all modification times (like to the nearest minute, not
every one of a thousand events in a 30 second timeframe). I'm gonna
put some thought into this, since just adding fields for every event
is far too expensive for a variety of actions. But its just something
that could be useful for the metadata stuff im working on.

3) Date stuff doesn't always seem to be 100% reliable in beagle, we
have lots of backends that are prone to wildly inaccurate dates etc.
While we can get the FIleSystemInfo or DirectoryInfo for file hits
(and can in turn get modification/creation times in most cases) I
think it wouldn't be out of the question to provide 2 new properties
to Hit (LastModifiedTime and CreationTime) for these values. While we
do find these values in properties sometimes, I think we should try to
make them more universial/stabalize our date information across
beagle's backends. (This is based off of some conversations had over 6
months ago, its possible all this has been fixed, but at the very
least the convention of making the creation/mod time part of the
indexables and hits (not properties) is worth consideration.

4) A small technicality when it comes to allowing searches with terms
like 'yesterday' would we still require date: ? aka.
date:yesterday
vs.
yesterday (assuming we want to be able to search for documents with
the word yesterday, this doesn't exactly work)

and for mulit-term phrases like '2 days ago' would we require quotes?
date:"2 days ago"
vs
date:2 days ago

the first is a little harder to discover, so we would probably need to
add it to our hint page. The second is just impossible to
intelligently discover what the user wants to do. ( I think)

Cheers,
Kevin Kubasik

On 10/17/07, D Bera <dbera web gmail com> wrote:
> > Beagle does support date queries, though.  So if you knew the date,
> > you could programmatically construct the extra query parameter, which
> > would be something like:
> >
> >     date:20071017
>
> It was added post 0.2.16 which unfortunately means its only in the svn
> trunk and not in 0.2.16.x, 0.2.17, 0.2.18 *sigh*.
>
> --
> -----------------------------------------------------
> Debajyoti Bera @ http://dtecht.blogspot.com
> beagle / KDE fan
> Mandriva / Inspiron-1100 user
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-- 
Cheers,
Kevin Kubasik
http://kubasik.net/blog