GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 230449
Results for calendar search should be shown in list instead of having to go through the months
Last modified: 2021-05-19 11:45:20 UTC
When searching for events, the current calendar behavior is often less than useful. Here's a scenario: It's mid September - you're looking for an arbitrary event which occured sometime between january and today - you enter the appropriate search criteria and then have to scroll backwards through the month views looking for the one bold day. It seems that a better interface might be to pop up a window to accept the search criteria and display a list of matching events, allowing you to "visit" any item in the list or dismiss the results. I tried to mock such a thing up in glade, but I can't promise it's at all valuable. Being pretty ignorant of the "GTK way" I couldn't do a 100% mock-up, but I've attached the glade2 file to this bug.
Created attachment 41466 [details] ui mockup
Dan, could you make and attach a screenshot to this bug? :) If I am going to talk to the developers about it, it would be easiest to show them that way, as they don't all have or run glade-2. -Anna
Created attachment 41474 [details] ui mockup screenshot
Sure - the intent, of course, which isn't completely clear from the mockup (mostly due to my minimal skill with glade) is that the results scroll list would have a few columns - such as: Date Description Category 01-01-2002 Bday: John Smith (1954) - 02-01-2002 Bday: Jane Doe (1956) - Each entry in the list would be selectable - selecting an item and pressing "visit event" would dismiss the modal window and move the calendar view to the appropriate date.
JP, Rodrigo: Dan makes a good point here about the difficulty of finding all the search results for a given calendar search, especially when searching over multiple months. While I think his solution needs further thought-- popping up a modal window as he suggests would be overly constraining, I think-- I wonder if you guys have ever encountered other complaints about our calendar searching behavior. Given that the current calendar search bar was designed with the message list in mind, it stands to reason that it doesn't behave well with the calendar. What I like about Dan's proposal is that all of the matching events (from across a span of months) would be returned in one spot. It seems to me that a possible solution* would be to add an "Advanced Search" option to the calendar which allows the user to specify search criteria including a range of months to search in. We could display a frame (within the dialog) like the one in his mockup with the matching appointments listed within it. One could then select a given event by clicking on it, and have the evo calendar display that event. Anyway, this is just a thought. Basically wondering what you calendar-hackers think about searches. -Anna *related-to-but-less-drastic than Dan's mockup, and with more evo-wide precedent
It seems a nice idea to me, since as Dan says, it might be difficult sometimes the appointments you're looking for. One option is the extra dialog you say, and another one I've just thought is to have the list of matched appointments appear in a drop down list from the search so that the user can just select the appointment he/she wants to visit. Or is that crazy? I attach a (poor) screenshot of what I mean
Created attachment 41520 [details] Search bar idea
related to bug 226958
Some of original discussions above are many years old and pre-date Evo's current search box. So in terms of updating this discussion: perhaps ideally there should be "previous" and "next" buttons on either side of the "search" box, when in the day/week/month calendar views, that would jump to the previous/next match? Ideally, should probably also jump to first match found on pressing the enter key.
Evolution search in calendars could be inspired by other software like Mozilla sunbird, with search results presented as a list, whatever the dates. As of now we have to admit that a great program like Evolution has no a proper way to search in the calendar. Hope the developers will think about this annoying bug in future releases. Thanks in advance!
I agree with Bob and the others, this feature would really be a helpful tool. I have missed it many times and thought it is me not knowing how to do it. But now I know it is a missing feature. Hopefully this feature request will get more priority, please!
I'd also love this feature, because I frequently have to search for some text in calendars, and trying to find it month by month is quite time-wasting.
I tend to Won'tFix this, because there are recurring events which can recur forever. How longest list would the users accept in that case? Evolution has those left-arrow, right-arrow and stop-sign buttons (actual appearance depends on user's theme) on the right of the Search entry, which can be used to get to previous/next event with the given search criteria. It really goes one-by-one, regardless of the actual view (which can be day/week/month view, it doesn't matter). That makes searching "by month" much easier, does it not?
Thank you, Milan, for your comments. After reading your explanation again, I understood that you can switch from event to event, too, not only from month to month. This is nice. On the other hand a list would give a better and quicker overview, especially if there are several similar events and/or you were not sure anymore when it exactly was. In case the list gets long, you could adapt the search entry to narrow down the results. Thanks for your kind consideration.
> I tend to Won'tFix this, because there are recurring events which can recur forever. How longest list would the users accept in that case? That's easy; for recurring events, limit them to 3 years in the past and 3-4 years in the future (but no such limitation for non-recurring events). Combined with the infinite scrolled view (non paginated), this is what Google Calendar does for its search function and it works fine. Pagination is counter-productive. Infinite scrolled list views are fine (otherwise how would we survive in the mail client part? ;) If you wanted to be fancy, you could also "compress" recurring events by showing some sort of label widget/row that says "This event recurs until..." but that's more complicated to implement etc. so I'll presume that's probably not an option. However, Evolution already has a display filtering mechanism to display events that "Appear less than 5 times" so the user has some flexibility there if they're specifically looking for non-recurring events to simplify the search results.
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