Adding filtered items to a collection

neaj

I have a bunch of items based on web pages from old poetry ezines. The items have very little metadata.

Now I want start tidying them. To find all poems by X, I can do a quick search or a saved search. However the results contain false positives and miss some uncredited poems.

So I want to select all the real hits from the search and drag them to the X collection. It seems I can't do this, but I'm probably missing something.

dstillman

This should work fine, so we're going to need a more explicit explanation of what you're doing.

neaj

1. Go to "My Library".
2. Do a quick search for e.g. "Marius".
3. Select 22 of the results that appear. (They are contiguous so I select the first and shift-select the last to select them all.)
4. Drag them to the "Poems/Marius" collection.
5. The collection does not change background to show that it will accept a drop. And indeed ignores a drop.

Ah, noticed something --- the search results show up expanded (item & child snapshot). If I close them before selecting, I can then select multiple and drag&drop successfully.

dstillman

You can't drag if both parent and child items are selected, since child items can't actually be dragged into collections. There's a plan to allow the drag if all child items of a given item are selected, but that hasn't happened yet.

neaj

Since child items can't be dragged by themselves, how about selecting all child items as soon as the drag starts? (Instead of requiring the user to select all child items.) Conversely when starting to drag only a child item, expand the selection to the parent and siblings first.

It's not so good to allow the user to drag around a selected block knowing that they will not be allowed to drop it anywhere.

dstillman

They can drag it other places (e.g., onto tags).

dstillman

Note that you can press the "-" (minus) key to collapse all items. You can also change the search mode to search title/author/year on top-level items, or you can use Advanced Search to search only top-level items.

neaj

Ah, I see. Good once you know the rules.

Showing a "Tags" tab to the right, allowing add/delete of tags for the whole selection, may be handier than dragging onto a tag, and facilitates batch deletion of tags.

Where else can they drag? Ah, I see I can drag into a word processor, getting HTML.

OK, the only other DWIM approach that comes to mind is: expand selection to all child items when hovering to drop on a collection, or after dropping on a collection. This teaches that items can only be dropped on collections as a whole.

dstillman

The selection can't change mid-drag. Nothing works like that.

The fix I outline above will address most cases of Shift-selection, and it sounds like it would've worked in your case. There's no need to overthink this.