Re: Advanced query mockup and saving searches

["Ben Monnahan" <monnahan gmail com>]

Warren,

Hey, I've been too busy the last couple days to respond.

2006/8/18, Warren Baird <photogeekmtl gmail com>:

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.

Screenshots are always nice for us lazy folk.

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.

Will the "AND" or "OR" be user selectable or will we need to decide that?

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.

In general the whole system seems fairly flexible and uses web paradigms that most should be familiar with. 
 

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.

We probably wouldn't use glade for it, but it shouldn't be difficult to write code to add and remove rows dynamically.
 

This is modeled quite heavily on how the iPhoto UI does things, 'cause I
found it works quite well for me there...

Nice to know its been found usable elsewhere.


One question.  How would NOT work in this UI?

I do like it and it should be easy to implement.  The other ones I remember are a search bar style and then the current drag the icons around to create searches.  Are there any other UI proposals?

Ben