343243 - Saved Search cannot use Saved Search as source (Select Folder picker doesn't show Virtual Folders)

Status: NEW

(Thunderbird :: Search, enhancement)

Description

[jherek]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en-US; rv:1.8.0.4) Gecko/20060508 Firefox/1.5.0.4
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en-US; rv:1.8.0.4) Gecko/20060508 Firefox/1.5.0.4

A "Saved Search" cannot use another "Saved Search" as a source.  Other mail clients (e.g., Mail.app) support this, and it makes sense both from the point of view of efficiency, and in order to be able to create complex boolean expressions through the user interface.

Furthermore, since the user interface exposes saved searches as virtual folders, it is counterintuitive that those folders don't show up consistently in all folder lists.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Go to File > New Saved Search...
2. Click on Choose...
3. observe that the list of folders does NOT include saved searches ("virtual folders")
Actual Results:  
virtual folders don't appear

Expected Results:  
virtual folders should appear in the list of folders that can be searched

Comment 1

[ovidiu]

I confirm this, but as rfe. 
Because it may be not intuitive from folders perspective, but actually we are talking about search on top of searches as a feature allowing to set more complex criteria in a different way than default saved searches ui.

Couple of corrections/additions/dep to update the report:
[vista, version 3.0a2 (2008072418), clean profile, no extensions]

1. Still not happening in tb 3.0a2. Essentially I find this interesting cause could solve easily a complex search setup regarding different criteria per folder(s), which is not quite possible now. The result looking like:

[new search](criteria X)
[v]folder1 /onlyX
[v]folder2 /onlyX
[v][old search](crit Y+Z)
    [v]folder3 /X+Y+Z
    [v]folder4 /X+Y+Z
thus with per folder criteria easy to set, complex operations doable visually and manageable.

Of course issues arise where redundant folders ,contradiction, should alert conflicts or other issues etc Eventually, not so easy to do, these "nested searches" 
*this is kinda bug 371152
  
2. "Search messages" when sseach selected present the top account not even the current account, so nothing here (also Bug 452765 )

3. the quick search case. (This does allow partially the thing)

Quick search operates normally on a saved search, thus it provides partially this functionality. But if you try to "save" from qs dropdown, you are presented the criteria with *no* folder checked. So it 
-*does* propagate the criteria from initial ss adding the qs one
-*does not* propagate the folders to operate on (no folder checked)
This I filed  Bug 452756 for separately, regarding quick search ..

I see qs on top of ss as the most correct this far, but this is somehow different cause it just creates a new ssearch starting from an old one. So it's more limited.


As a conclusion I see this solvable:
* starting with adding nested criteria/conditions in search (and filters etc..) with per folder as a necessity. This would actually create a new ssearch starting from old one but with respective advantages.
* Another idea is to just allow it with all the issues aside