Boolean Chart Redesign

[David Marshall]

On 7/19/10 2:33 PM, "Gervase Markham" <gerv at mozilla.org> wrote:

> On 17/07/10 15:09, Max Kanat-Alexander wrote:
>> * The way that AND, OR, and multiple charts work is really confusing. I
>> didn't fully understand it until I fully understood Search.pm, which
>> very few people understand.
> 
> I think that your statement of the problem is entirely accurate and very
> well put, and that having a way to do arbitrary boolean logic would be
> very useful, but that your suggested solution (both for the UI and
> possibly also for the URL parameters) results in increased or, at best,
> equal complexity rather than an improvement.
> 
> This is not a new problem; people have been creating graphical query
> builders for some time now.
> 
> Would it not make sense to a) look at those and b) talk to some of the
> usability people we have and see if we can come up with a design for
> building queries which is less complicated?
> 

A few of things come to mind:

A lot of programs have rules-based filters where one of the choices are "all
of these match" or "any of these match."  This is essentially the AND/OR
choice.  Perhaps we could implement something like that?

Perhaps searching should be regarded as just a set of filters applied to
bug, anything you can search has its own filter section in advanced search?

Boolean charts would become fully expressive if a position in a chart could
contain another chart.  Max's example was:

(a AND b) OR (c AND d)

This could be represented in a chart as:

chart1:
(0,0): chart2, (0,1): chart3

chart2:
(0,0): a
(1,0): b

chart3:
(0,0): c
(1,0): d