Re: [SMW-devel] Adding autocompletion for printouts to Special:Ask

[Jack D. P. <jac...@ps...>]

I am one of those "thousands of properties" users.  My systems are already
having significant performance issues (where SMW/SF are enabled).

I love the idea, but is there a possibility of limiting the amount in the
drilldown (e.g., only the first 10 starting with the letters typed), and if
so, would this help performance?

Jack D. Pond
"I am certainly not one of those who need to be prodded. In fact, if
anything, I am the prod." -- Sir Winston Leonard Spencer
Churchill(1874-1965) 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Markus Krötzsch [mailto:ma...@se...] 
> Sent: Tuesday, August 17, 2010 6:19 AM
> To: Patrick Nagel
> Cc: sem...@li...
> Subject: Re: [SMW-devel] Adding autocompletion for printouts 
> to Special:Ask
> 
> On 17/08/2010 02:58, Patrick Nagel wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > On 2010-08-17 02:16, Yaron Koren wrote:
> >> Sanyam (who is cc'ed) has been working hard on his Google 
> Summer of 
> >> Code project, which has been about converting SMW and 
> various of its 
> >> extensions to use the jQuery Javascript library, and to 
> generally use 
> >> more Javascript. The project is basically done now, and you'll be 
> >> hearing a lot more about it later, including from Sanyam.
> >
> > Great news, thanks! :)
> >
> >> For now, I
> >> just wanted to ask one question - I'm planning to start 
> checking in a 
> >> lot of Sanyam's code to SVN soon, and there's one change 
> to Semantic 
> >> MediaWiki itself that I wanted to ask about. Sanyam added 
> >> autocompletion for the "additional data/printouts" textarea, which 
> >> you can see here if you start typing:
> >>
> >> http://discoursedb.org/wiki/Special:Ask
> >>
> >> I just wanted to know if anyone thinks this autocompletion 
> is a bad 
> >> idea, or has any comments/criticisms about the specific 
> look-and-feel of it.
> >
> > It looks very useful, and it will make figuring out a query 
> much much 
> > easier. I often found myself switching between an example page's 
> > Browse properties page and Special:Ask, and copy- and pasting the 
> > property names into the 'additional data to display' field. 
> That is no 
> > longer necessary with this functionality - big improvement 
> for the user!
> >
> > I see a potential problem with Wikis that have a very large 
> amount of 
> > properties - Special:Ask would then load slowly, because all those 
> > property names are in the page. Would it be possible to 
> choose, like 
> > in SF, between 'autocompletion' and 'remote 
> autocompletion'? Also, the 
> > dropdown does not have its own scrollbar, which looks a bit 
> weird when 
> > there are hundreds of properties in it - but it's not really a 
> > problem, and I don't know if it would actually be better if the 
> > dropdown had a scrollbar.
> 
> I fully agree with Patrick: great feature (I like the way 
> that the autocompletion works with a free text field), but it 
> should not kill a wiki that has some thousands of properties, 
> please. If it does, it should be controlled with a 
> configuration option that is switched off by default.
> 
> I also would like to see Special:Ask overhauled at some 
> point. As great as autocompletion is, it does not really save 
> the special page from being a rather bloated and complex 
> interface now. But this should not stop us form improving it 
> at least a little if the opportunity exists.
> 
> -- Markus
> 
> 
> >
> >
> >
> > 
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> > --------
> > This SF.net email is sponsored by
> >
> > Make an app they can't live without
> > Enter the BlackBerry Developer Challenge 
> > http://p.sf.net/sfu/RIM-dev2dev
> >
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Semediawiki-devel mailing list
> > Sem...@li...
> > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/semediawiki-devel
> 
> 
> --------------------------------------------------------------
> ----------------
> This SF.net email is sponsored by 
> 
> Make an app they can't live without
> Enter the BlackBerry Developer Challenge 
> http://p.sf.net/sfu/RIM-dev2dev 
> _______________________________________________
> Semediawiki-devel mailing list
> Sem...@li...
> https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/semediawiki-devel
>