put a query on hold to allow user interaction

[jiu]

This is more of a feature request than a bug report, I'm posting it following a suggestion on the forum: http://www.exaile.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=255

Queries are very slow (at least in the 0.2 branch) but more importantly, the query blocks off any user interaction so if you want to modify the text of the query, you have to wait for it to finish.

I think one way to improve this (while retaining the design whereby you don't need to type enter for the query to start) is to allow for queries to be interrupted at any point when the contents of the search box are modified and restarted 50ms after user interaction stops (or some other delay).

This ability to interrupt could later be extended to other types of user interaction (besides typing in the search box) if it helps improve responsiveness of the software.

There should be a moving icon similar to the firefox wheel (on the top right) which signals a working query, and also signals when it stops.

[Steve Dodier-Lazaro (sidi)]

Queries are now fast and asynchronous and shouldn't be a problem even on old computers.

May one of the developers confirm that this is, thus, not needed anymore ?

[reacocard (reacocard)]

Queries are MUCH faster now, but I do not believe they are asynchronous yet. Unfortunately, as a large part of the time is spent actually drawing the tree (in fact, several times more time is spent on that than on the search itself!), there isn't any way to do it in a non-gui thread. It might be possible to split it up into multiple steps, allowing other gui events to iterate between steps, but that could raise other, subtler, issues as well.

[Niko Wenselowski (nik0)]

My collection contains about 19k tracks and when searching for "the" Exaile gets unusable for many, many minutes!

When the search is finished every Artist - Year - Album where the searchterm fits is unfolded. Could it be possible to not unfold everything (and so save the time to draw everything) if the search returns a lot of data?

[reacocard (reacocard)]

> My collection contains about 19k tracks and when searching for "the" Exaile gets unusable for many, many minutes!

This is a regression caused by bug 403019.

[reacocard (reacocard)]

> This is a regression caused by bug 403019.

Er sorry, bug 403018. >.<