Quick search bar: present only top level items, or at least collapse item+attachment hits
Very happy with the quick search bar menu — finally quick search has become quick again.
One qualm is left for me: I think quick search in Title+Creator mode should display top level items only. Right now the search results look really messy because they contain a lot of top level + attachment hits.
I think it is safe to assume that when people search in Title+Creator or All Fields mode, they expect to be searching fields, not filenames.* So I would say: show top level items only. The expanded items only result in visual clutter.
(In fact the only time one would be happy to see an attachment is when it does have a hit while the parent item doesn't. If you really want to show attachments, that would the only case in which it is useful. Perhaps expanding all items is reasonable in "Everything" mode.)
* From a db point of view the attachment name is probably a field etoo but I'm taking a user's point of view here. Attachment name "feels like" a file name and feels distinctly different from all the right-pane editable fields that one would expect to be search in quicksearch.
One qualm is left for me: I think quick search in Title+Creator mode should display top level items only. Right now the search results look really messy because they contain a lot of top level + attachment hits.
I think it is safe to assume that when people search in Title+Creator or All Fields mode, they expect to be searching fields, not filenames.* So I would say: show top level items only. The expanded items only result in visual clutter.
(In fact the only time one would be happy to see an attachment is when it does have a hit while the parent item doesn't. If you really want to show attachments, that would the only case in which it is useful. Perhaps expanding all items is reasonable in "Everything" mode.)
* From a db point of view the attachment name is probably a field etoo but I'm taking a user's point of view here. Attachment name "feels like" a file name and feels distinctly different from all the right-pane editable fields that one would expect to be search in quicksearch.
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Gregcompletely agree!
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markedited August 29, 2011(Gentle bump. I'd like to find out if the devs agree, too. A similar problem was present in the Word plugin, where it will be fixed. To my mind the behaviour should be consistent between the word plugin and the quicksearch in Zotero.)
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dstillman"Titles & Creators" will match only top-level items in 3.0b2.
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markThank you! Love it!
This discussion has been closed.