GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 793243
enhanced search function
Last modified: 2018-06-13 12:31:12 UTC
I took a lot of notes in my contacts. In evo, I cannot search for "notes" entries. So a search feature which covers all address card entries would be helpful. The result should be provided as a csv list to be copied to clipboard or saved to a .csv or .vcf file, so processing the results would be possible. This is similar to my feature request https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=793242
Advanced Search > Expression does not work for this? You can already export your address book to CSV. Not convinced this is a common use case.
No. Advanced search only covers the contents of name, e-mail, category and "expression" (don't know what the latter does) , AFAIK. Well. Search contacts by all kinds of weird criteria and then process these findings is a very basic PIM task I think. I cannot even search for people living in a certain city and create a mailing list for these. So I should extend this request to enhance the advanced search by more criteria. Maybe easiest would be to make all fields from a contact card selectable and offer various request like "is", "contains", "starts with" "ends with" etc.
> Well. Search contacts by all kinds of weird criteria and then process > these findings is a very basic PIM task I think. That opinion depends on use cases why someone would need to "process these findings". So far no specific use cases were provided... :) (In reply to herrdeh from comment #2) > I cannot even search for people living in a certain city and create a > mailing list for these. True that you cannot search for city explicitly. Only way is in the Search bar dropdown, choose "Any field contains" and enter the name of city. But if other fields of other contacts also contain the city value string it's...blurry.
> "process these findings".... Ah sorry. I thought this is obvious. You may want to create email address lists (or postal address lists as well, for those who still know how to handle sheets of paper, envelopes and stamps) out of your contacts following certain criteria, eg * you are a motorcycle parts dealer and want to offer model specific spares to the owners of that model; model is saved in the notes (real case from a customer of mine, who does that on a Mac - I'd like to migrate him to linux, but at the moment I'd not know how he can handle his customers lists in evo) * I have my sailing friends marked with "sailing" in the notes. If I want to invite my local friends them to a tour, I need a list "notes containing "sailing" & location is "Berlin". * I want to invite my local friends to a party. The I need to find "location is "Berlin" OR phone number starts with "030" (because I do not have the postal address of everybody. I thought everybody does such things - at least occasionally. > True that you cannot search for city explicitly. Only way is in the Search bar > dropdown, choose "Any field contains" and enter the name of city. But if other > fields of other contacts also contain the city value string it's...blurry. But it does not work with notes, phone numbers... dont know what else. To
Sorry, messed the quotation.
Thanks for a bug report. This might be easier for address books than it is for calendars (bug #793242), because address books can be fully introspectable, thus one can write a script in languages like python and do whether he/she wants with the vCards, without a need to rely on the evolution itself. Not talking that some users prefer tools like GNOME Contacts, GNOME Calendar, GNOME To Do and such, which are not part of the Evolution code base (but they use evolution-data-server to read/write components/contacts, thus Evolution and they can show the same data).
To search in Notes you can use the Expression: (contains "note" "sailing Berlin") You can save such search in Search menu, if used often. You can then select all contacts (Ctrl+A) and then right-click the selection and pick Save as vCard, which will save all the selected contains to a file, with which you can do further processing. That means, it's all there, only some parts of your requirement are not integrated in the GUI and require advanced knowledge. Especially the Expression part is problematic, because there is no user documentation for it (or at least I do not know about any).
Thank you very much for your patience and all your effort. Well - this is a solution, I can even make it quite dummy proof by saving the search. But - on the other hand it's a "worst case feature": nobody knows about it and it's nearly impossible to learn about it (exept by reading this thread....) And I'm really curious about other possibilities of searching with expressions...
Right, I've been thinking of moving the bug to User Documentation, but then I decided to close it, because it'll be better to track in GitLab, instead of here, and because I didn't want to keep too much noise in the new bug report. The thing is, the Expression search is very powerful, it even allows and/or/not, but it's not for regular users, I'm afraid, thus it's not in the User Documentation as well. I guess so, at least.
(In reply to herrdeh from comment #8) > nobody knows about it and it's nearly impossible to learn about it > (exept by reading this thread....) That is not true. Anyone is free to read the user help. "Help > Contents > Sorting and organizing mail > Searching Mail > Searching Across Messages > Quick Search" says "Advanced users can combine numerous conditions by using the Free form expression syntax." and links to the list of parameters.
This bug is for Contacts and the other Expression, not the Free form expression, which is for Mail only. :)
Argh! I am sorry. If there is anything to add to the user docs, please file a separate task with sufficient info to contain if you think it's worth it. Thx!