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

[Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason]

On Sun, Dec 6, 2009 at 17:31, Sebastian Klein <bastikln at googlemail.com> wrote:
> 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. :)

This mostly sounds good, but more generally it would be nice if we had
a preset system for search queries just like we have one for tags now.
Then users could in the search menu select from some drop-down list of
presets like "edited by me" (to search for user:$myusername), or
"boundaries" and so on.

Then you could just re-use these presets for the filter presets since
the presets are just search-powered views on the OSM data. The
interface in the filter dialog could be exactly as you suggest but the
presets would be shared with the search engine.