On Sat, 13 Nov 2010, Brooks, Travis C. wrote: > But if I do the same with "author" selected in the dropdown, I get no > results because everything is sent to author blindly. > > This is a rather frequent usability issue for me, and thus I imagine > others.
Yes, this is something we may want to change, and rather sooner than later. IIRC the original reasoning behind current behaviour was going like: if a user bothers to tweak the drop-down menu to choose ``search XXX in author'', then chances are XXX represents the author name, and so the whole value gets dispatched there; because if people want to use more than one fielded search, they probably keep the dropdown value on its default `any field' value, not bothering to change it. This way of reasoning may have some merits, but we may rather want to pay attention to XXX to see whether it contains some other fielded search or not. Personally I think I would prefer the any field and the author field dropdown values to behave exactly the same here, as you also seem to suggest. That is, if people search for P1 P2 P3 in F, then send P1 P2 P3 to F unless there is some Pi of the form Fi:Xi in which case this unit will be rather dispatched to Fi instead. This is a kind of rather visible change in Invenio's search behaviour, so we'd better hurry implementing it before v1.0.0-rc0 is out, if we like this change. If someone does not like this change, then please speak up, otherwise I'll ticketize it in a day or two. Best regards -- Tibor Simko
