kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Wayne Stambaugh <stambaughw@...>]

Dick Hollenbeck wrote:
> Wayne Stambaugh wrote:
>> Dick Hollenbeck wrote:
>> 
>>> Wayne Stambaugh wrote:
>>> 
>>>> SuperLou23 wrote:
>>>>
>>>> << snipped >>
>>>>
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>>> Unfortunately, from a little digging, I think it would take a pretty big rewrite of the component file spec and other tools to allow tagging in there without it being a hack. I do think (from my own experience) however that the old method of browsing folders for components should have died long ago. Filtering by tags and name in real time would make my life much easier (especially as the company parts db continues geting larger). I think there's a reason why autocomplete is very popular nowadays.
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>> Tags are called key words in the component library object. There is
>>>> already some simplified wild card searching built into the component
>>>> library class. Adding regular expression searching is on my short list
>>>> and should be fairly simple. It would allow for much more sophisticated
>>>> search capability compared to the current solution. No rewriting of the
>>>> library file structure is necessary. I have begun putting code in place
>>>> to merge the separate library and document file implementation that we
>>>> currently have. I still have some work to before that takes place but
>>>> I'm sneaking up on it. Take a look at class_library.h and
>>>> class_library.cpp in the eeschema directory of the Kicad source to see
>>>> how key words figure into the library component object search.
>>>>
>>>> Wayne
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>> Cool. Doing fancy searches like what this will eventually support 
>>> strikes me as something that would be difficult to do in a relational 
>>> database. I marvel that the computer I now use has 12 gigabytes of 
>>> RAM. This sort of means that a relational database is not quite as 
>>> valuable as it once was. You can load a lot of libraries into 12 
>>> gigabytes of ram, and do some pretty fancy searching in pretty short 
>>> order. 
>>> 
>> I already have the regular expression component library search code
>> written in my development branch. It will be in my next commit. Now
>> someone has to write the code to do something interesting with it. The
>> big job will be updating all of the component library key words to have
>> something meaningful to search for. Hats off to every one involved in
>> cleaning up the component libraries.
>>
>> Wayne
>>
>> 
> We do something like this in a software product we have. Unfortunately, 
> most users do not know the regular expression language, so it was not as 
> well received as we thought it was going to be.
> 
> Logical ANDs and ORs might be more useful, possibly with wildcards i.e. 
> '*', at the front or back end of a keyword. My knee jerk reaction is to 
> duplicate something that a user might be able to do at the google search 
> text field.

I was thinking along the same lines of your classic web bases search
where you enter some key words and select and/or, case, full word, etc.
and translate that to a regular expression as required to perform the
actual search. Exposing regular expressions is probably not what the
typical user is going to comfortable using. Although it might be a nice
advanced option for users who know how to use them.

Wayne

> 
> Dick