Quote:
Originally Posted by dmapr
So how hard would it be to make these different behaviors configurable?  |
Ranges from hard to near impossible.
The one that won't happen is a series column that can have multiple (name,index) values. The database scheme simply won't allow it, and changing the schema is too hard. Kovid is talking about someday doing a library redesign, and that is the only time when it might happen.
Searching across all columns with a common prefix (series, series_1, series_2, etc) is feasible. I had a conversation with starson17 about this, where the idea was to search for series*:value. Someone (probably me) needs to be convinced that the effort is worth it. I am leaning toward 'yes'.
Merging instead of separating series is also feasible. My guess is that it should be done with a tweak, so that the standard behavior is consistent across all column types. I will look (hard) at this possibility as I implement the collection management stuff. Of course, having this tweak for series creates the possibility/need for a similar tweak for tags/text columns, so I suppose I need to look at that as well. The more tweaks that appear, the less happy I am about doing any of them, because feature interaction problems and bugs become too hard for my brain to work through.
It seems to me that common prefix searching and series collapsing will give you a usable approximation of what you want. Given that what you want is reasonable, I will try to make it happen.