2006/11/19, Jos van den Oever <<a href="mailto:jvdoever@gmail.com">jvdoever@gmail.com</a>>:<div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> 2006/11/19, Mikkel Kamstrup Erlandsen <<a href="mailto:mikkel.kamstrup@gmail.com">mikkel.kamstrup@gmail.com</a>>: > org.freedesktop.search.simple.countHits ( in s query , out > i count ): >  Why is this necesary. Is it to accomodate use cases such as suggestion > popups like below[1], and reduce the dbus wire traffic for multiple calls? Not just that, it is also required for paging ( page 1, page 2, etc) and lines like 'Found X hits.'</blockquote><div> Ah, ofcourse :-) </div> <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">> Type text in entry: net > Get a popup with: >             net   (7801) >             network (6578) >             netto (17) No, this is another case. Here you see numbers for each keyword, but where do you get the keywords from? For something like that you'd need a call like: expandWord(in s word, out a(si) wordlist)</blockquote><div> Well, it could be based on an expandQuery() method, but applications could also list old searches with hit counts. Ie. in the above example I would have searched for net, network and netto at some point in the past. There are numerous ways to obtain suggestions... </div> <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">> org.freedesktop.search.simple.query ( in s query, in i > offset, in i limit , out as hits ): >  What is the general consumer of this method? I don't see many. Only stuff > like deskbar-applet or a general search tool would use it. Maybe adding a > parameter to specify a list of groups the hits should match (or maybe > specifying mimetypes). This argument could be "*" or something to get all > kinds of results. I suggest changing the signature to: > query ( in s query, in as groups, in i offset, in i limit , out as hits ) Interesting suggestion. It does make things quite a bit more complicated. Because you'd need to define the groups. We've not talked about the query language yet ( we need to, but i'm assuming we're going to use something similar to what Beagle and Strigi already use, which is almost the same), but you also just expand the query like this: "holiday" -> "holiday mimetype:video/*" before sending it to the search-engine. That seems much better defined than a list of vaguely termed groups. I do not object to having such names for the user to see though.</blockquote><div> Yeah,  there are a few decisions to make here.  How much to put in the query language and how much to put in the api. I think and expressive query language is a good idea. However your example above doesn't fir all cases well. What If I want to search for all "Documents" containing the word "parser". The Documents group could fx. be files of mime types: application/msword application/pdf application/postscript application/vnd.ms-excel application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.text application/vnd.sun.xml.writer text/plain text/html </div> calling "parser mimetype:application/*" would probably not yield the desired results. Maybe also having an option to search like "parser group:documents" would be good? The Spotlight API has the notion of groups like this for example. <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">> How about live queries? Maybe that should be supported in another interface > than the simple one. Yes it should. Maybe we should try to get this running first. Live queries are rather tricky.</blockquote><div> Yeah, simple queries a definitely to priority right now. It is important that we don't forget the bigger picture when designing the interface though, so we need to take future work into consideration. </div> <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">> org.freedesktop.search.simple.getProperties ( in as > files,in a(sa(sas)) properties ): >  This seems good. It is a bit toward a metadata interface, but I think it is > good here to so apps don't need tons interfaces to work with. At some point > it there should be a specification on how to name and format these > properties/metadata. Small correction, it should be: org.freedesktop.search.simple.getProperties ( in as files,in a(sa{sas}) ) where one can argue about whether or not to send back the filename again. It's not needed, but also does not take much bandwidth. </blockquote><div> Agreed. </div> Cheers, Mikkel </div>