Hi all!Here's a very rough mockup of an advanced query UI. I couldn't figure out how to get glade to save the initial settings of the widgets, so I attached a screenshot as well.
I'm sure it also needs some explanation. The basic idea is that the query will be broken down into components - each row in the UI will represent one component, and the overall query will be the "AND" or "OR" of the components.
For each row, the first drop-down will let you pick what kind of information the component will search - it will include things like "Tags", "Date", "Comments", "Exif", and "Rating" (once we have a rating system in place). The remaining drop-downs will change based on what is selected from the first drop down.
For "Tags", the second drop down would let you choose from things like "Contains", "Contains all of" "does not contain any of", etc... The third widget would be a text entry widget, but similar to the "Tags" tray (brought up by the 't' key on the main view) - it was create a comma separated list of tags with tab-completion.
In general the third widget would change radically depending on the first and second values - for "Date" "between", it would give two date widgets, etc.
I am afraid I haven't done much gtk/glade programming in general - so I don't know how hard it would be to generate this kind of dynamically generated UI.
This is modeled quite heavily on how the iPhoto UI does things, 'cause I found it works quite well for me there...
I'm not sure of a good way to represent grouping in this UI. iPhoto does it by having the concept of a 'folder' as a collection of photos - and searches are saved by creating a 'virtual folder' that contains all of the photos that match the search. So you can basically chain searches together by creating virtual folders representing search1 and search2, and then creating a new virtual folder defined as "folder equals search1 or folder equals search2".
This raises an interesting question to me. How have we envisioned saving searches? A tag in iPhoto is approximately equivilent to a folder in iPhoto - it identifies a set of photos. Would it make sense to treat a saved search as a 'virtual Tag' in f-spot? I'm talking primarily from the user's perspective here - I'm sure that the internal representation would be completely different. What I'm talking about is something like having a 'Saved Searches' category in the tag tree, with an entry in it for each saved search. You could view the results of the search at any time by clicking on the search the same way you do a tag. *AND* you could then chain searches easily...
Just a thought... Warren
Attachment:
queryui.glade
Description: application/glade
