125631 - mail search and filters: default should be "all" instead of "any"

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(MailNews Core :: Search, enhancement)

Description

[Jesse Ruderman]

AND searches should be the default in mail search.

- Consistency with search toolbar (bug 123788).
- Consistency with modern search engines (e.g. Google, Teoma, Lycos, Alltheweb).
- "Or" searches are really not that useful, especially if you can't combine
them.  You might as well just run two searches.  ((A or B) and (C or D) would be
more useful, but that's not this bug.)

I would suggest making this change to the filter dialog as well (for
consistency).  While "or" filters are more common than "or" searches, I search
much more often than I edit my filters.

Comment 1

[jglick]

Sounds fine to me.

Comment 2

[(not reading, please use [e-mail] instead)]

mass re-assign.

Comment 3

[Sander]

Attachment: patch

This is to show that whining about favorite bugs in one's weblog is not always
completely useless and sometimes actually can make random people take the two
minutes to fix (and ten test check that it's actually the right fix). :) 
(Okay, and I'd just noticed myself always toggling this thing as well when
searching.)

Comment 4

[Sander]

Comment on attachment 145730 [details] [diff] [review]
patch

Neil, could you take a sec for review of this super simple fix?

Comment 5

[[e-mail]]

Comment on attachment 145730 [details] [diff] [review]
patch

Looks good but it doesn't work with Create Filter From Message :-(
BTW you can probably get rid of the selectedItem attribute.

Comment 6

[Sander]

Comment on attachment 145730 [details] [diff] [review]
patch

Oh, gaah!
So I just spent an hour tracing where this is set for create filter from
message, but as far as I'm able to determine, it isn't - rather, it's a result
of the and=true, or=false assumption made, with uninitialized thus resulting in
or, and that in a next step being set for real.
So either I'll need to initialize this myself somewhere (but where?), or remove
the logic for setting this when based on uninitialized. 
Need to spend some more time familizarizing myself with what's going on before
I can decide what the most correct fix would be.
*grumbles grumbles* stupid deceptively simple code - that'll teach me to help
with a quick cheap fix... :)

Comment 7

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

(In reply to comment #0)
> AND searches should be the default in mail search.

conditionally, I disagree per https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=324113#c2

Comment 8

[Phil Ringnalda (:philor)]

Since there's just one of things like FilterEditor.js and searchTermOverlay.xul, let's move this to MailNews Core: Shared UI.

Oh, yeah.

Comment 11

[Phil Ringnalda (:philor)]

Attachment: patch, v2

"Neil, could you take a sec for review of this super simple fix?" I just took the value of the radiobutton from the UI, stuck it into the filter item, where it turns into a column in the UI, which is then hidden because it's unreliable, but before it's hidden the value comes back out of it to set the radiobutton in the UI to the value that the radiobutton in the UI already has.

I found that two hours of continuous handwashing after writing the patch was enough to start to feel clean again; your mileage after reviewing may vary.

Comment 12

[[e-mail]]

I take it you also meant to change the mail view and virtual folder default?

Comment 13

[Bryan Clark (DevTools PM) [:clarkbw]]

Comment on attachment 349611 [details] [diff] [review]
patch, v2

Seems like a better default.  

It would be good to have a "search for conversations with..." style search option that allows people to search all of the to/cc/bcc fields at once.  Otherwise I can see how this might make that search a little harder.

Comment 14

[Kent James (:rkent)]

(In reply to comment #13)
> (From update of attachment 349611 [details] [diff] [review])
> Seems like a better default.  
> 
> It would be good to have a "search for conversations with..." style search
> option that allows people to search all of the to/cc/bcc fields at once. 
> Otherwise I can see how this might make that search a little harder.

That's bug 310359.

Comment 15

[Phil Ringnalda (:philor)]

(In reply to comment #12)
> I take it you also meant to change the mail view and virtual folder default?

I meant to change everything, but I see that Tb's quicksearch defeated me. Lucky that I picked a reviewer who will be happy to call that another bug, eh?

Virtual folders I changed, intentionally: I see that as being "Search Messages... And I Know I'm Going To Click The Save As Search Folder Button" and having them different would be weird.

Views by themselves, I don't think I changed: they set booleanAnd to true on their own, and did before I got to them.

But, Tb's quicksearch, and the horror of combining a view with quicksearch...

It's certainly undiscoverable (after six years of using mailnews/ products, I discovered it by reading the code), and probably undocumented, but you can do OR quicksearches (in SM or Tb) with "foo|bar", which is implemented by .split("|") and then saving each bit, including [0], with booleanAnd = false.

With this patch, if you save "foo|bar", we'll bring up the dialog with OR selected, thank Ghu. If you save "foo", we'll bring up the dialog with OR selected, which isn't what I would choose. If you save "foo" with a view, say Tags - Important, we'll bring up the dialog with OR selected, despite the fact that the search, "subject contains foo", booleanAnd = false, "tags contain important", booleanAnd = true, evaluates as an AND. And if you save "foo|bar" with a view, we'll bring up the dialog with OR selected, despite there being no radio button which can express what you're doing, because that actually lets you (in limited circumstances) do a search that people are always asking for, (subject contains foo || subject contains bar) && tags include important.

But as I say, that's a Tb-only problem, and thus not this bug, and maybe our next incarnation of quicksearch will have some different bug instead.

Comment 16

[[e-mail]]

(In reply to comment #15)
> (In reply to comment #12)
> > I take it you also meant to change the mail view and virtual folder default?
> Views by themselves, I don't think I changed: they set booleanAnd to true on
> their own, and did before I got to them.
When I do View > Messages > Customise... [New] it defaults to "or" without the patch and "and" with the patch.

Comment 17

[[e-mail]]

Comment on attachment 349611 [details] [diff] [review]
patch, v2

>+        term.booleanAnd = (gSearchBooleanRadiogroup.value == "and");
Nit: don't need the ()s.

>     <radiogroup id="booleanAndGroup" orient="horizontal"
>-                selectedItem="or" oncommand="booleanChanged(event);">
You may prefer to use value="and" here instead of radio selected attributes.

Comment 18

[Phil Ringnalda (:philor)]

http://hg.mozilla.org/comm-central/rev/10e7cea5a551