Searching within a notebook should inform the user that no results were found within that notebook

Bug #386893 reported by Scott Ritchie
14
This bug affects 2 people
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
Ayatana Ubuntu
New
Undecided
Unassigned
tomboy
Unknown
Wishlist
tomboy (Ubuntu)
In Progress
Wishlist
Unassigned

Bug Description

Binary package hint: tomboy

This is a small, but simple, bit of polish that I'd really like. I was searching for one of my notes, so I typed some words in it into the search bar. No results were found, and I was sure I had a note named like that, leaving me momentarily confused. It took me a bit to realize that I was searching within a specific notebook, and that tomboy was confining my search to that notebook in particular.

So, my suggestion is relatively simple - when the user is searching within a notebook and no results are found, write something like "No results within this notebook found" in the area where the search results normally appear.

Since the user's next action there will usually be to search all notebooks instead, it would also be nice to offer to do this for the user. So something like "No results within this notebook found. Click here to search across all notes." Clicking there would then have the same effect as clicking on All Notes.

Another case to consider is when the user finds a note while searching within a notebook, but not all of them. Here the system could (in the background) scan all the notebooks when a notebook-specific search is done, and then if other matches are found say something like "4 matching notes were found in other notebooks".

Anyway, even if only part of these suggestions are tried, it would probably improve the user experience, especially for new users to tomboy who don't yet know that searches are confined to a particular notebook. Thank you!

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: amd64
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 9.04
NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia
Package: tomboy 0.14.0-0ubuntu1
ProcEnviron:
 PATH=(custom, user)
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: tomboy
Uname: Linux 2.6.28-11-generic x86_64

Revision history for this message
Scott Ritchie (scottritchie) wrote :
Changed in tomboy (Ubuntu):
importance: Undecided → Wishlist
status: New → Triaged
Changed in tomboy:
status: Unknown → New
Changed in tomboy:
status: New → Confirmed
Changed in tomboy:
importance: Unknown → Wishlist
Revision history for this message
Abhinav Upadhyay (er-abhinav-upadhyay) wrote :

Hi,
      I made some additions to the code. So now, in case if there are no search results found in the selected Notebook, the user will be shown a Messagebox, where he is asked if he would like to search in All the Notebooks. If the user's response is Yes, then the search is performed again, with "All Notes" selected.

It is working fine on my system.

I am running Ubuntu 10.10
Architecture: x86
Package: tomboy (1.5.2)
uname -a : Linux 2.6.35-27-generic #48-Ubuntu SMP i686 GNU/Linux

Revision history for this message
Abhinav Upadhyay (er-abhinav-upadhyay) wrote :

I guess, the message box solution is too obtrusive. It unnecessarily takes away the focus.

Scott suggested to display a message in the search results area along with a button to search again in all the notes. But I am not a gtk# hacker. So I don't know if something like that can be done without too much changes. The search results are displayed in a Gtk.Tree view.

If there is a more elegant solution possible, then please suggest, I will try to make the changes and resubmit the patch :)

tags: added: patch
Revision history for this message
Luke Yelavich (themuso) wrote :

Abhinav, since you said you are going to take a shot at improving your submitted patch, I'll assign this bug to you and mark it in progress. I have also sent your patch to upstream, and it can be found in the bug link to the GNOME bug tracker on this page.

Thanks for your work.

Changed in tomboy (Ubuntu):
assignee: nobody → Abhinav Upadhyay (er-abhinav-upadhyay)
status: Triaged → In Progress
John Kim (epikvision)
Changed in tomboy (Ubuntu):
assignee: Abhinav Upadhyay (er-abhinav-upadhyay) → John Kim (epikvision)
Revision history for this message
Abhinav Upadhyay (er-abhinav-upadhyay) wrote :

Hi John,

You are welcome to work on this issue, but be aware that a patch for this issue has already been merged upstream, although there is a slight regression. You might want to check the upstream bug report on bugzilla.

Revision history for this message
John Kim (epikvision) wrote :

Actually Abhinav, you can be assignee again. I'm very new to the bug fixing scene anyway.

Changed in tomboy (Ubuntu):
assignee: John Kim (epikvision) → nobody
Revision history for this message
Thomas Ward (teward) wrote :

I am not certain this needs fixing in Ubuntu, rather I believe it should be fixed upstream. This is in agreement with the opinions of Julian Taylor (jtaylor on freenode), during the brief discussion on this bug which was brought up on the MOTU IRC channel on freenode.

This should really be left to be fixed upstream, and not fixed specifically in Ubuntu at this time.

------
Thomas
BugSquad Member

Revision history for this message
Abhinav Upadhyay (er-abhinav-upadhyay) wrote :

John: I contributed a patch upstream but the bug has not been closed there because of a slight regression. I can't work on it because of lack of time, so you are welcome to work on this and make sure the bug gets closed upstream. :-)

Thomas: I agree with you. The issue has been addressed upstream to a large extent but left open to fix a corner case.

Revision history for this message
Scott Ritchie (scottritchie) wrote :

Right, and the usual procedure in these sort of circumstances is to wait until upstream releases a version with the patch included, then when you push the package update for Ubuntu for that version you can just add (LP: {this bug number}) to the changelog and this'll be autoclosed.

Regardless, I'm happy about the work going on :)

Changed in tomboy:
status: Confirmed → Unknown
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