78749 - Need to provide end user feedback in history for days with no entries

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Core Graveyard :: History: Global, defect, P3)

Description

[Todd Pringle]

Build ID:  2001050204

Currently the implementation is such that if, for instance, "4 Days ago" has no
history entries in it, the folder does nothing when clicked on.  Having the
folder implies that you can open it and see what's in it.

Would suggest that we allow the user to open the folder and have (no entries)
underneath.  Thoughts?

Comment 1

[Alec Flett]

personally, I think it would be nice, but not critical.. folders that have
entries have twisties next to them, so I'm futuring this..

but for future reference: the way I could solve this bug is that when the
enumerator searches the last item in the table (not sure how I'd determine
this), if it had made no matches, then it would return a special uri that would
map to the user-visible string (no entries)

Comment 2

[Matthew T (active 1999-2002)]

No file manager does this. Nor does Bookmarks. I think this is a wontfix.

Comment 3

[Alec Flett]

no, this isn't like a file manager or bookmarks because these folders don't
actually exist except in an abstract form - I generate them at runtime by
creating find:-prefixed urls. I think maxing out at MIN(expiration, 7) is
probably sufficient

Comment 4

[Matthew T (active 1999-2002)]

On further thought, days with no entries should not have folders at all. Making
a user open a folder, in order to discover that there are no entries for that
day, is just wasting their time.

Comment 5

[timeless]

currently a user should be able to find out that a folder is empty by the 
absence of a |> widget.

Comment 6

[Rafael Ebron (:rebron)]

If there's nothing in the folder, that folder shouldn't show up at all.  Empty
folders are just taking up space, especially if you're using History in the My
Sidebar.  

Comment 7

[Tim Powell]

There'd be no need for end user feedback if the empty history folders weren't 
there to begin with. I agree that they shouldn't be there if they're empty. And 
in case it's not known, in 20010821, you *can* double click these empty folders 
and they change to the open folder, but they don't do anything else. I think 
this will lead users to think that the history viewer is broken.

Comment 8

[Alec Flett]

reassigning history bugs to new owner - send this bug back to me if it looks
like something I should fix (such as embedding-related architecture issues),
rather than the actual history owner...

Comment 9

[Blake Ross]

Attachment: patch?

Comment 10

[Blake Ross]

alec, is this the correct way to do it, or is there an easier way to tell that
there are no matches for a given find query?

Comment 11

[Alec Flett]

Comment on attachment 69908 [details] [diff] [review]
patch?

seems like a reasonable approach to me, assuming it works :)
I'm wondering through if you can't tell earlier if there are more elements -
i.e. in both these cases, are you already processing the query, or are you just
dealing with it as a raw string?

Comment 12

[Blake Ross]

Yeah, it works.  We only have the raw find string.  CreateFindEnumerator turns
it into a searchQuery.

Comment 13

[Blake Ross]

Fixed.