Barry4679 wrote: ↑Sun Nov 15, 2020 1:56 am
- Change of View mode should just change the view, not change filter criteria. MM5 takes us out of control of navigation|filtering causing confusion. Examples:
- I am in Grid View in the AlbumArtist node ... I have filtered to just Captain Beefheart ... I change view to List by Album ===> you re-filter the contents that I have navigated to, by adding 92 other unwanted albums?
- again in AlbumArtist node ,,, I am in List by Album View, and have filtered to just Jazz albums ... I change to Grid View, to get rid of the visual clutter coming from all the tracks details ==> You disappear all my Albums, and show me nothing
- the confusion continues in AllTracks node ... I type "cap" again ... this time Captain Beefheart is joined by other artists, since I an not in AlbumArtist node, so you are searching more than just the AlbumArtist index ... that's good, I can understand that .... but if I change my View from List By Album View to Grid, ===> the album count goes from 28 albums, to 127 albums ... unexpected, and unhelpful
- in each of these cases I lost control over MM5, by just changing "View"
I have given some more thought to this, and have a suggestion to make.
I think the design decision was that a contextual filter query should only return results where the user can easily understand why the items were included. This is why a filter of "
cap" from Album Artist, in Grid mode, only returned
Captain Beefheart in my example, because I can only see albumartist tags in that grid.
And the same search in the Album Node returns many more results, because this Grid display displays Album title, as well as AlbumArtist, so I also get results like Hub
Cap from Freddie Hubbard.
That's OK in one sense ... not 100% OK, because maybe I was searching for any album containing that track
Captain Stupido ... but it is generally OK.
But what is
not OK is when I have made my filter selection,
and then are just changing View mode ... it is not OK for you to change filter criteria.
In this case your "helpful" approach is just damn annoying, and is unacceptable IMO.
My suggestion is as follows:
- introduce a new rule into existing sort syntax rules:
- n:xxxx being results where xxxx is the primary tag for the current sub-node ... ie. just the albumartist in albumarist subnode, or both the album & albumartist in the album sub-node
- +:xxxx being where xxx is any tag (from the list at Tools|Options|Library|Search), regardless of whether they are displayed
- everything would work exactly the same as now, excepting when the user is only changing view ... a simple change of View would, unless the criteria was already in one of the "+" or "n" formats, modify any current contextual criteria from:
- from "xxxx" to "+:xxxx" when changing to Grid View
- or from "xxxx" to "n:xxxx" when changing from Grid View
- this way the user remains in charge when changing View mode
- the other benefit would be that the existence of the + and n syntax formats would be generally useful to power users, and would overcome the one reservation that I mentioned at the top of this post
If you were feeling super-generous you could add:
- -:xxxx being results where xxxx is any tag that is returned to be displayed ... eg. ignore matches in path, if path was not one of the columns selected for display
