GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 320243
Enhance search box so user can supply boolean values
Last modified: 2018-05-24 10:51:39 UTC
Currently the search facility in rhythmbox is very primitive and acts as a simple filter. I would like the ability to perform boolean seaches so that I could filter for two or more band names or two or more genres, song name in specific genre etc. e.g. I could supply values to the search field such as "punk OR classical", "Killing Joke OR thee Phantom Creeps" etc. etc. Alternatively this functionality could be implemented by having three radio buttons next to the search box with values "Normal", "And" and "Or". When the "And" mode was selected the search results would show only items which contained all the words supplied in the search text box. When the "Or" mode was selected the search results would show only items which contained any of the words supplied in the search text box. When the "Normal" mode was selected the search would function as it does now. Or perhaps the search could becme even more sophisticated via the use of an SQL like dialect so you could supply "WHERE (Artist='Ceramic Hobs' AND Genre='Alternative') OR (Genre='Classical')". Obviously there would have to be some sort of optional interface available for this as many users would not be comfortable with writing such queries themselves (but the ability for "power users" to do so should be allowed) But some sort of more advanced search would definitely be an improvment. Other information:
I remembered there was some work on this several months ago, and after some searching found the patch at http://mail.gnome.org/archives/rhythmbox-devel/2005-April/msg00041.html
Created attachment 59606 [details] [review] Query parser patch Add from mailing list post so it doesn't get lost.
Marking as enhancement.
*** Bug 352637 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Gah, I even searched because it seemed so obvious. Not sure how I missed it. Anyway, sorry for the dup!
Not quite a dupe, it seems. This bug is about the search box, bug #352637 is about the same concept applied to the auto playlists. Fixing both of these bugs is likely to involve some common code, however, and maybe some of the code in the patch may be useful for both cases.
*** Bug 466187 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
How about using regular expressions (regex)? The patch seems overkill So you can filter to find ONLY goa music instead of some heavy metal band named goat on the Jamendo network: ^goa$ Perhaps just rename "this OR that" into [this|that] so you can always apply regex functionality.
Regular expressions are not user friendly. If you don't know anything about them, you will be unpleasantly surprised by the results you get once you do anything beyond alphanumeric string searches. I don't want to have to teach people how they work, or make them read a complex introduction to regular expression syntax. I'd rather be able to say "it works like google". Anyway, this patch is way out of date, and if someone were to implement this, using the search extensibility stuff I'm doing in bug 508750 would be a good idea.
*** Bug 570146 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 598071 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Any status on this bug? It's a great idea.
+1 on the coolness and importance of this feature. as a comparison, gogglesmm added this feature within 6 weeks of the initial request; it's been 5 years since the same feature was requested here...
Has there been any progress on this feature? I would love to have simple boolean expression support. If needed, I can try to update the old patch.
The mailing list has a plugin suggested here: http://mail.gnome.org/archives/rhythmbox-devel/2011-March/msg00005.html May be try it out and see how it works.
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