[josm-dev] How to make the filter feature foolproof

[Sebastian Klein]

Hi,

The Filter feature [1] is great, but still not ready for general use. I, 
for one, fool myself every now and then and think I have lost data, when 
it was actually just hidden by the filter.

So how can we improve the situation?

First of all I think that the vast majority of all filter texts will 
consist of _one_ pattern, only. (E.g. "boundary", "FIXME", "user:me") So 
one could sacrifice the possible modes of combining different filters, 
for an easier interface:

Just use normal Layers to represent filters. The advantage would be that 
one usually keeps an eye on the layer list and so you don't forget about 
it so easily. Layer visibility would correspond to Filter 
enabled/disabled. 'Hide' and 'Invert' would be icons on the layer entry 
that can be toggled. The other options (if any) would be accessible 
through the right click menu -> 'edit'.

You would insert a filter from the main menu:

- 'add new Filter'
- 'add preset Filter' > ...
- 'add saved Filter' > ...

Then the dialog could look something like this:

Pattern: ______________

o show only the specified elements
o hide the specified elements
--------------
☐ case sensitive
☐ regular expression
☐ apply to child elements

When multiple filter layers are present, they would simply combine like 
'AND' because this is what one would expect. To compensate this, one 
could introduce something similar to the filter in Thunderbird. 
(Multiple conditions can be combined.)

I haven't done any coding, so feel free to object. :)

__

Basti