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Suggestion: More complex boolean search options
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Post by
SaintVigeous
I know this is a pain, but if anyone can get this right, you guys can.
There are times where I want to be able to nest my search criteria. For example, if I want all cloth items that have healing or MP5, but are not PvP items.
This kind of search cannot be done with just "All" or "At leat one" qualifiers. I realize that paranthesization is unwieldy in UI and that forcing users to use a query expression is equally onerous. You might be able to solve this with a higher level of grouping. For example, there could be a new option called "Add New Filter Group". This would add a new set of filters separate from the first. Within each group the expressions would be "and"ed and each group would be "or"ed (essentially this would just concatenate the results of two queries ala SQL UNION). This would lead to some redundancy, but at least I could represent the query above.
Complex, I know. But it's always nice to have a pie-in-the-sky request out there. :)
Post by
pelf
May I direct you to this thread? :)
http://www.wowhead.com/?forums&topic=154&p=1617
Post by
SaintVigeous
Blast! Why do I keep on missing these awesome threads? You clearly have had the same experiences I have had regarding this topic. ;) I wonder if there is some published work on boolean UI theory that we need to be reading. Or Maybe the Wowhead team will pioneer the techniques. :)
Post by
pelf
Ha! Well, to be less self-deprecating, I did implement a statement creator that allowed ANDing, ORing and NOTing on arbitrary fields which supported field aliasing (for lookups) and pulled possible values from lookup tables for those types of fields. (This was DHTML with a smattering of AJAX for pulling the value lists on the fly.)
Parenthesization? I threw that to the winds and left them to the dogs of order of operations, as it were.
It's really the grouping ability in boolean statement creation UI design that has kind of put me off all along. As the rest of the filtering UI has been quite good so far, I'm anxious to see how they improve it fundamentally. If anything, there are now so
many
filtering options that I often scroll for quite a while reading down the list trying to find what i want :).
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