GSoC Wrap-up Part 1

This year’s Google Summer of Code has ended. And it was a great success!

This year I had the pleasure to mentor two outstanding students: Adam Kidder and Alessandro Sivieri. Working with them was fun and rewarding. Both quickly understood what Nepomuk was all about and provided high quality work. I am very happy about that. Even more so since both of them plan to continue working on KDE and Nepomuk. Thus, I can only repeat myself: a great success.

Enough of the euphoria. Let us dive into the good stuff and start with Adam’s project:

Improved Virtual Folders

We have had the virtual folder KIO slave in KDE for quite some time now. But it was one big hack I threw together and always had its hickups, not to mention the lack of features. Adam took the project of improving the situation by making it more stable, introducing new features such as negated terms and relative dates, and providing a GUI for query creation. I can assure you that this was no easy task. Diving into the messy code I produced both for the Nepomuk query service and the search KIO slave Adam needed nerves of steel. But he proved himself by understanding and sorting out the mess and introducing a bunch of nice features.

Relative Dates

One of the nicest thing Adam implemented is the support for relative date in queries. By relative dates I mean for example yesterday as you can see in the following screenshot:

Virtual Folder using a relative date

Another possible relative date is “a week ago” which can of course also be combined with other query terms:

Apart from relative dates Adam implemented

Negated Query Terms

Using a minus sign as the negation prefix we can exclude certain query terms:

Querying for one tag

Excluding another tag

Very useful and mandatory for any search engine.

One thing I personally find very important is the possibility to use

Sparql Queries in the KIO slave

This allows to use the KIO slave to list arbitrary query results (as long as its only resources) and list them in Dolphin or even use a KDirModel to list resources in any application.

Listing Nepomuk Tasks via the Search KIO slave

Now let us have a look at the

GUI

Due to the complexity of Adam’s project’s code he did not get as far with the GUI as he would have liked. But as mentioned already he will continue to work on it and integrate it into Dolphin nicely. Anyway, so far we have a small query creator which allows to save queries that are then displayed in the nepomuksearch:/ main folder.

Editing a query in the simple query editor

Try it

If you want to test Adam’s new features before they are merged into trunk you need to install his work branch which replaces a few files installed by kdebase-runtime. The query editor is still part of the Nepomuk playground module. It is not enabled in the build system of the whole module, it needs to be built independantly.

That’s it for now. Next up: Alessandro’s smart file dialog.

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