Re: Tag search for all / any tags

["Dotan Cohen" <dotancohen gmail com>]

On 04/10/06, Warren Baird <photogeekmtl gmail com> wrote:
> Dotan Cohen wrote:
>
> > Instead of cluttering up bugzilla, I'll state here that the AND
> > operator sounds most logical for people and keywords, but not for
> > places or events. The reason is that a photo cannot be in two places
> > at once- so the OR operator is logical. Maybe top-level tags could be
> > assigned (by the user) to default to AND or OR internally? I think
> > that searches across top-level tags should be AND.
>
> Wasn't it you who said you didn't want the app to do anything
> automatically for you?  :-)

Yup, and nothing automated in my proposal!

> I think we need to make it easy for the user to decide whether each term
> should be AND/OR and not try to guess which one they want.  I've added a
> number of top level tags, and I wouldn't always want 'AND' to be used
> across them.

That's why I mentioned that the user could define the behaviour inside
each top-level tag. Explaination below.

> I think it would be confusing to have different behaviour depending on
> what top level category the tags are in.  If you use the text based
> searching (where you type the names of the tags), you might not even
> know what the top level category is...

Yes, it might be confusing to have different behaviour for different
conditions. A simple default of AND might then be best.

If we want to give the user the option or an OR search we can go one
of two routes:

1) In the Edit Tag dialog of a top-level tag, there could be a
checkbox that makes searches within the top-level tag revert to OR
behaviour. Additionally, in the Preferences there could be an option
to have searches across top-level tags revert to OR as well.

2) Just have everything AND, and when users want something more
powerful, they can fire up the Advanced Search dialog. There's a patch
for that, that worked rather well I believe.

Dotan Cohen
http://what-is-what.com