kidder's blog

A Small Recap

My intent in this project was to improve the state of the nepomuksearch:/ kioslave. Specifically, I wanted to add the features required to make desktop search a better experience in KDE. I also wanted to work on a more accessible GUI for desktop search. About halfway through the project I blogged about my work to date.

The State of KDE Search

I’ve introduced several new features since I’ve last blogged about my project.

• Date parsing has been improved. In particular relative dates are now supported (although this still needs work. More about that in a bit!)
• SPARQL queries are now supported directly in the kioslave. This is great if you want to show the results of a SPARQL query directly in a UI element – you simply create a KDirModel and point it to a nepomuksearch:/ URL. This was implemented directly as a result of a request from Alessandro Sivieri, who is using this in his GSoC project.
• Folder limiting is supported: it is now possible to specify where (and where not) to search, when searching for files.
• “Pretty sizes” are supported through the kioslave, so you can search by the size 7MB instead of just 7000000.
• Other minor improvements.

As well as improvements to the backend kioslave, I have also started on a UI for search.

This is the beginning of what will be integrated into Dolphin in time for 4.4 It is possible to search via full-text, as well as add various criteria that will be searched. The “Save This” button saves the search into the kioslave config file for later access.

Wrap Up and Thoughts

GSoC has been a great experience for me and I encourage any students interested in KDE, or open source in general, to consider applying next year. KDE has been a great project to work with, with great libraries and code, but most importantly great people to work with. I’d like to thank Sebastian Trüg most of all for his help as my mentor, and for putting up with me through the summer.

I consider my project mostly successful, although there were a few more things I would have liked to implement. One of the features that didn’t make it in time was automatic refreshing of relative date queries: so a date modified query with a time of “one hour ago” will update each hour to remain accurate. I had planned to implement this before the end of GSoC but it ended up being more complex than I originally thought.

The Future

I fully intend to remain developing for KDE after GSoC. I’m taking a short break to mark the end of GSoC, and then I will be back developing in KDE.

My immediate plans are to finish a few of the backend issues in the kioslave, and then merge this branch back into trunk. I’ll also continue working with Peter Penz on getting the UI code integrated into Dolphin in time for 4.4. Later on, I’d like to work on a more semantic-focused search UI, perhaps using the filter model developed by Alessandro.

Tags: KDE, open-source

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 22nd, 2009 at 7:54 pm and is filed under GSoC, Programming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.