Support search operators

[mixxxbot]

Reported by: rryan
Date: 2010-10-15T20:39:41Z
Status: Fix Released
Importance: Wishlist
Launchpad Issue: lp661454

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The library search feature could include some nicer search features such as :

title: FOO artist: BAR genre: BAZ

We could even support some operators within the sections like:

year: >=2005
year: =2005

Since this would be an "advanced" feature, the mini-language could have some degree of complexity, though the basic Google-like ones above should be easy for anyone to get.

[mixxxbot]

Commented by: ywwg
Date: 2011-10-02T16:34:11Z

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It would be nice if we could also search ratings. Maybe interpret "***" as "three stars"? Or "rating: 5" to be consistent with the description above.

Furthermore, since typing while DJing isn't pretty, I'd like short versions of the terms also. "g:" could also be interpreted as "genre:" as a shortcut. Oh and BPM ranges too: "b:120-125".

[mixxxbot]

Commented by: bloodybeet-deactivatedaccount
Date: 2011-10-02T16:55:50Z

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All said functionality has been implemented in my branch. If you check out my branch, check out the user manual under "temporary fts doc" for the FTS to see the resulting functionality.
Adding shorter aliases for fields is also something that passed my mind. It's absolutely no biggy to get them implemented - it would simply require a small addition in the tokenizer.lex file.

I think it would be good to include the FTS functionality as "experimental" to some public release, so users can check it out and test in the long term. I'm expecting a lot of comments on how the syntax can be refined etc.

[mixxxbot]

Commented by: rryan
Date: 2012-03-28T04:34:19Z

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As a stopgap before Bart's Full-Text-Search branch is finished I hacked up a dead-simple query parser tonight. It's currently in trunk.

• Text filtering (artist, album, genre, title, composer, comment)
• Numeric filtering (year, track, bpm, duration, played, rating)

For text filtering, you can do queries like:

• artist: "com truise"
• artist:Danger
• genre: Trance

Note it doesn't matter if you have a space between the colon and the argument or not.

For numeric filtering you can do either either exact number or range filtering:

- bpm:140
- bpm: >140
- year: <2010
- bpm: >=140
- rating: <=4
- bpm: 140-150
- played: >10

Note that you can put a space between the colon but currently there must be no space between the operator and the number.

I left fuzzy-matching (e.g. "~bpm" to specify tracks with similar BPMs to currently playing tracks and "~key" to specify harmonically compatible tracks) as stub methods in the SearchQueryParser class. If anybody wants to tackle those it should be pretty easy to get started.

[mixxxbot]

Commented by: rryan
Date: 2012-03-28T04:36:24Z

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I forgot to mention, of course you can combine these operators.

List all Danger tracks that are rated 4 or 5.

• artist:Danger rating:>=4

There's no way to do an OR right now. That's another thing that isn't too hard but I don't have time to tackle right now.

[mixxxbot]

Commented by: esbrandt
Date: 2012-04-06T09:52:36Z

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Thanks for implementing this RJ - a great addition to all users. We should emphasize that in the 1.11 release changelog .

Can you briefly outline what Bart's Full-Text-Search branch is missing in order to qualify it for inclusion in the trunk?

[mixxxbot]

Issue closed with status Fix Released.