Quicksearch - search subcollections of the current collection also.

grubs

For collections with subcollections, I would like quicksearch to search the entire tree including and below the currently highlighted collection.

Right now (v2.1.8) quicksearch searches only the current collection but not into any subcollections. To me, the logic of subcollections is the parent encompasses the various subcollections under it so I'd like to see quicksearch search them all. If I just want to search a single subcollection its easy enough to open that subcollection and search within it.

I fully understand this may complicate how the search results are displayed but perhaps an indenting scheme or just a horizontal line between the subcollection results.

dstillman

Enable the recursiveCollections hidden pref.

grubs

Thanks Dan,

To clarify my feature request.

When the end user has recursiveCollections FALSE, my request if for quicksearch to behave as if recursiveCollections is TRUE.

My manual toggling of the setting shows quicksearch could temporarily enable recursiveCollections, do the search and display the result and then flip recursiveCollections back to false.

The behaviour could be toggled by a checkbox in the search preferences "quicksearch includes subcollections ( x )"

The point of subcollections IMO is to enable a level of organisation that arranges citations intuitively into smaller related groups. recursiveCollections in regular use defeats this as the parent collections now list enough records as to be unweildy.

When conducting a search of a parent (e.g. using quickfind) however I think the search *should* treat the collection as if recursiveCollections is true to enable the search to find the logical result.

ChildrenSisyphus

Sad to see that such a seemingly simple feature is still missing 6 years later.

dstillman

What feature? As I say above, you can do this by enabling the recursiveCollections setting.

I don't agree that quick search should search subcollections by default. Quick search is a filter of the items list, similar to tags, and I think it's much more intuitive to treat it that way. It's possible there could be an option to have it search subcollections, but I think offering a quicker way to toggle recursive collections makes more sense. That will likely happen at some point.

bwiernik

Some options to extend a Quick Search outside of the current collection would be nice (e.g., buttons at the top of the search results to repeat the search in the top level library or to search in sub collections) might be nice though.

ChildrenSisyphus

Thanks @dstillman . However, enable the "recursiveCollections" will result in sort of a mess that all the items from subcollections will appear in all higher-level collections.

Anyway, it would be nicer to have an option for search subcollections, which may be explicitly put in the Advanced Search, instead of inside the drop-down menu in the current form.