Re: help for "quick search"

On Sun, Mar 8, 2009 at 11:31 AM, Levente Torok <toroklev(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:

> Look. The problem is the following.
> We have exteremely large number of items in the obj browser tree.
> In general, this is very unpleasant to manually search for items in the
> tree even if we know the exact name of it. For this reason we usually use
> psql console since it has mighty tab completion.
> If only such a quick filtering functionality would be integrated in the GUI, it would be extremely helpful.

Except that, per my previous comments, it's like to be a lot more code
and less useful than a true search.

> (not to mention the console integrated in the pgadmin)

It can easily be in 1.10, using the plugins mechanism - in fact
integrating psql is our standard example.

> I wouldn't like to do any click or key hit, if unneccessary and the synaptic's quick seach such as:
> http://www.basicconfig.com/files/imagepicker/j/jinlusuh/Screenshot-Synaptic%20quick%20search%20seamonkey.png
> are good examples of this but Compiz config, or KDE's control center are worth considering too.

I understand what you are suggesting, but believe that in many cases
*more* clicks will be required. A search results listing can easily
show additional pertinent information about each matching object such
as it's type, owner and comment. With a filter, you can view the type
through the location on the tree, but that might require scrolling.
For information such as the owner or comment, you must locate and
click *every* object until you find the one you actually want.

In addition, you could easily further refine a search results listing
by sort by different columns, or applying filtering to the results
list (for example, to only show objects owned by a certain user). That
is much harder to present in a UI in the design you propose.

What do others think?

--
Dave Page
EnterpriseDB UK: http://www.enterprisedb.com