The more I actually use Fibery day-to-day, the more tasks I complete, and the more “closed” entities I end up with. Yet they all still show up in my searches. This really limits the usefulness of search at times, whether in the Ctrl-K pop-up or in-line entity linking (this is even more of an issue due to Narrow texts in entity search pop-up make correct selection difficult.
I’m not sure the best way to handle this. I know the “status” is a feature of the Workflow Extension. It seems important enough and often used enough that perhaps it deserves its own option in the search dialog, and one which could be persistent, i.e. I don’t have to check it on every search. It could instead be in Preferences for each user somewhere, I guess, but with an optional override on the search window (i.e. the setting controls the default state).
Of course given the power and flexibility of Fibery, one could also imagine value in more general filtering based on the state of given fields, and being able to persist that. Honestly this seems like potential overkill to me though, or at least hard to imagine how to easily implement it (actually I just had some ideas, ask me for details if it seems important enough to discuss further).
At the least I think starting with an ability to enable default filtering out of “closed” (or user-selectable status?) entities would be very helpful.
Btw I know this has been talked about before elsewhere, but I couldn’t find a separate topic for it.
The more I think about this as I am using Fibery, the more I think it might be good to be a global setting of some kind. For example I’d also like to have this filtering for back-links! And having to add filter controls to search and backlinks, and maybe other places may be non-ideal, or at least may be down the road for implementation. I have a thought as to how it might work though, still being customizable and flexible, but without making the UI too complex. These are just ideas, of course.
So what if you put the visibility setting for entities of a given status within the Workflow Extension settings? There are at least two ways this could be handled, I think. One potentially more powerful or “clean” (or maybe easier to implement?) than the other, but less “discoverable”.
First, you could simply add visibility control to the Workflow Extension settings panel. This could take the form of a more rigid and simple toggle “hide “Completed” entities from searches”, and maybe a separate toggle for “Hide completed entities from backlinks”. OR more powerfully, have a multi-select field there to select from the actual workflow options above, so you’d have one multi-select field “Hide these Statuses from Searches by Default” and another “Hide these Statuses from Backlinks”, and you could select “Closed”, but also any other status you want. If multi-select is hard to implement for this, it could be a single select. If more power is desired…
You could instead implement the same/similar within each Status Option (Alt-Click to reach settings from within a given Entity). So within e.g. “Closed” you’d have the existing options, Color and Icon, and then toggles for “Visible by default in searches” and “Visible in backlinks”. I thought this might be more powerful, but now I think about it, the multi-select above should accomplish the same thing, and may be the better approach unless it’s not possible, or you need to have more controls for different areas where you want to control entity visibility by status.
In either case, on any Search pop-up, perhaps have a toggle “Disable all filters”. This would work well as long as the preferred and most common filter state was set on each Workflow Extension for each Type, which I think is a good way to handle it. Then if you really need to access an old, closed entity, you can, it’s a little more inconvenient, but more importantly the most common use case is much more convenient, and also configurable on a per-type basis.
I can think of an analogous use case that I have: filtering on approval status.
We often have items that undergo a workflow of draft, reviewed, approved. Limiting to only approved items would be great.
(to be honest, it ties in with version history as well, which i think has been discussed elsewhere, but that’s another story )
This kind of touches on something I’ve made a request on (outside the forum): to be able to display certain fields in search results, like with fields you select to show in the collection.
Ah interesting, yeah I can see the potential value in it. Especially when we are (hopefully) able to search in any field contents.
So I guess it would work the same, a toggle would be added to every Field “Show in search results” or something? The main challenge might be in the design of the Search box(es), especially for in-line search. The Quick Search popup has more room as it is…
Agree 100%! I would expect in most good search tools in advanced Work Mgmt apps that you’d get an array of bespoke filters, layers, etc. of search, that you should be able to save as well and return to. “Closed” items have a certain property in Fibery, which is great as this is another area it has a leg up on the other “Big Three” of Notion/Air Table/Coda as none of those recognize that out of the box.
So it would follow that you should be able to filter those out as well to get proper visibility into your data.
I just used one of my precious votes on this. I would like to stress that what I’d like to see is even something very simple, when you hit “ctrl” + “k” show state of entities, even just giving them a strikethrough if they’re closed, which is what happens in references, where you don’t currently see the other attributes you get when you #link in Rich Text. Specifically:
In Comments and Rich Text, you see assignee, state, Type Abbreviation Badge and if the Entity is closed, it’s in strikethrough. Very useful!
In References, you see only Type Abbreviation Badge, and strikethrough if it’s closed.
I would be happy simply with strikethrough, like in references, when searching within the global search dialog. @Oshyan’s original title of this request is good, but I’d like to see at times closed items as well. @Oshyan would you be willing to edit and expand the title of this to reflect some of the other comments we have made here?
I will also think about posting a very specific individual request about just showing strikethrough, or not, in that search dialog.
@Polina_Zenevich or @mdubakov would be very glad to get your response about whether if something like simply showing strikethrough or now in that dialog would be possible. It would help us a ton as we have increasing amount of stuff in Fibery that is older, much of it is closed, etc. And it’s hard to see those when searching right now. With the increased amount of entities by the day, this makes search increasingly time consuming as we often choose something we thought was open, but you can only see if it’s closed after you select it.
These are good thoughts on the problem. I’ve updated my title above, trying not to be too prescriptive with how this gets addressed. I’ll try to outline what I see as the ideal solution here. And maybe it can be rolled-out in stages, depending on what is easiest to implement (I have no idea what that might be, unfortunately).
Visually indicate “closed” status items clearly in search results (e.g. grayed-out, strikethrough, etc.)
Add more full entity status indicator to search results, e.g. status icon (this would give additional info beyond just strikethrough for closed, but it’s important to strongly distinguish closed, hence it is #1 in the list)
Add a filter option on the search dialog to show/hide “closed” status entities (maybe just a little toggle to the right of the current search box, since it conceptually doesn’t fit with the current “type” filters)
I would really like all three of these, but personally #3 would likely be the most useful for me if only one can be added. This is because over a long time of use ultimately the “closed” entities will outnumber the open ones, so even with a clear indicator of closed status you’d still end up having to scroll a ton to find what you want.
I sometimes also find myself looking for a way to exclude by default some objects from search (commits for instance) because they pollute the search results. It would be easy to include them back using the list on the right if needed.
By the way this is a great, great point. It would be even better to simply exclude close entities as you’re right, there are starting to be too many tasks/work entities in my Fibery that even if the closed were gray, you have to get around them. Dev Tasks for example that start with “Refactor…” or something like “Update…” etc.
Really hoping to see some of these basic improvements in search soon, it’s such an essential part of the day-to-day when you use Fibery extensively!
Yes, all the more true when you have good, fast search like in Fibery! Ironically in some other apps with slower or less useful search, you might often just navigate manually to something, or even scroll a list or use browser Ctrl-F It is in part because Fibery’s search is already pretty good that this problem starts to become as significant as it is.
And hey, yes this is true, very true! I have noticed that when typing in the search bar, the results just pop up.
That said, I seem to continue to notice not great speed around other aspects of Fibery, such as page loading. And this is a bit off topic, but one huge quality of life improvement I’d like is the ability to tab over to the Type when creating an inline entity with the “#” command. You can do that when you create from scratch via “ctrl” + “K,” but not when you are writing inline. So I lose my flow on the keyboard by having to grab the mouse and navigate to the Type I want to create inline. I already discussed this here:
in that quote and throughout the thread. Thoughts on whether this warrants a new request? Curious of other power users such as @Chr1sG or @Matt_Blais or @rothnic could use this? Or importantly, did you understand my explanation of the problem
Since you asked, I can say that I have noticed some UX frustrations when creating/linking to entities from rich text/documents, but I don’t do it often enough for it to be a high-priority issue for me personally.
Like Chris, I am aware of this issue and agree with your proposal, but I don’t deal with it often enough myself for it to be a big frustration or top priority (i.e. I can’t/won’t vote for it ).
I’m not sure whether it needs its own post, Polina said it’s in the backlog, so that’s good. But the fact that topic is marked “fixed”, but is not yet closed (so that it’s not available for voting), is a little confusing. @mdubakov any thoughts on this? Do you want to mark that one closed and a new feature request can be opened to track this?
Wanted to ask for any update here? As Oshyan pointed out here, and sorry for quoting again but is becoming systematically more relevant for me as weeks go by and the Fibery instance grows:
I am losing a good deal of time now clicking “closed” entities in search that I can’t remember if they are done or not.
I will add that another place this already exists in an acceptable format are in collections: There, all “closed” entities show up grayed out as soon as you start typing. Either this, or the strikethrough format you see in references, would be perfect.
In doing a comparison of ClickUp and Fibery search functions today (Fibery won in a landslide, it’s shocking how bad ClickUp search is!), I again came upon the desire for the more general interpretation of this feature request. I even forgot that there had been further discussion in this topic about the possibility of extending the specific “filter based on workflow status” to the more general “filter based on contents/status of arbitrary fields”, and I came to the forum to make exactly that request. I typed it all up and everything, and then, after linking to this and other topics… I decided I should read the contents of this just to be sure I wasn’t making a duplicate. And more or less I was.
But, so that time is not wasted, I am coming here primarily to ask @mdubakov whether it seems better to edit the topic title and/or update the first post here so that it better describes the broader feature request, or if perhaps I should make the following into a new feature request. An interesting thought occurs to me here, which is that Fibery’s own nice integration with Discourse probably makes it less problematic that later replies in this thread have changed the possible scope of the request, in that you can just highlight the important bits and reference them to the internally-tracked feature/dev task(s). However at least for participants here who are voting on the request, I think the title and first post are still quite important and worth getting right.
So for now what I’m going to do is summarize what I think is the best version of this idea/request, along with linking to all the search-related topics that I think relate in some way, with some notes on how they are similar or differ. This can be added to the first post if it makes sense to do so, or split-off into its own thread (as the length of it seems to suggest, now that I’m done writing and mocking it all up ).
Request Summary - Search Filtering Based on Field Values
I would like an additional filter function or filter “pane” to be added to the “Quick Search” popup to filter the search results based on the values/contents of particular fields. Essentially the user should be able to filter the text-based search results not just by which Database it appears in, but also by values of certain fields in that database. For example being able to quickly search for entities in the Bugs database that are Assigned to a particular person, or where the Creation Date is older than a specified date.
View Filters are Not Enough
Obviously this is possible in View Filters already, but having to create an entirely new View+Filter (or a temporary filter, or even use My Filters) is cumbersome, especially as the number of databases increases. “View proliferation” is a real problem, and becomes especially so when view filtering is the only way you are able to effectively find things quickly based on multiple criteria. To my knowledge there are no really clear solutions from the team for this “view proliferation” (besides perhaps using the new Blocks functions to embed a bunch of different views on a single page, but that’s not really a good solution IMO). I don’t see a major reason why the Search dialog could not be elegantly extended to allow this dynamically (especially given that filtering functionality is already in the back-end, it seems).
Implementation and UI Suggestions
This of course does not work with all field types (primarily Rich Text probably doesn’t apply), and it should not include all fields for filtering by default (across all databases) because that would be unwieldy. We also would need room in the search dialog for these extra options, without making the dialog too large or cluttered. There are several ways this could be handled, for example a “Filter” button at the top of the Search dialog that pops out another search pane to the right (next to database filtering), or even a dialog just like the Filters on Views (pop-up with existing filter creation UI). Given the existence of the Filter UI and functionality, if it could be added easily to the Search dialog unobtrusively then it might be a very nice, low-impact solution.
However a different approach with a more significant overhaul of the UI is what came first to my mind, so I’ll outline that for what it’s worth. Note that re-using the Filter dialog as mentioned above may in fact be the superior solution, I’m not sure. I just had this in mind so I wanted to put it out for everyone to consider.
First, I think the existing database filter arguably takes up too much room (vertically), especially when you have lots of databases. A Discourse-like dropdown list (with search) could address this same UI need in a much more compact way:
This is the dropdown that appears when you click on the text “All Categories” on the Fibery forum home page. Hopefully it is clear that, by default, what you are viewing in the forum is contents from “All Categories”. In the Categories dropdown you have a Search, and you have a (scrollable, if necessary) list of Categories. This is the exact same functionality as the current Database filter in Fibery, but it takes up a fraction of the space, and expands only as necessary.
This leads to my second suggestion, which is that certain “important” fields (or perhaps I should say “globally relevant” fields?), primarily what used to be called “Extension” fields (Status and Assignee in particular) be available for filtering across all databases. This might also include Creation and Modification dates since they are universal to all Entities. But filtering on more database-specific fields might perhaps only be available when a specific Database is selected. So what would appear below this compact dropdown Database list by default might be:
State
Assignee
Creation Date
Modification Date
And perhaps Files (a “has files?” checkbox), and maybe even Documents and Whiteboard (i.e. “has documents?”, etc.). But those 4 above at the least seem worth including by default for filtering across all Databases.
Then if you pick a Database, an additional set of Fields show up below that for filtering. Now this could be just all fields in that Database (those that make sense anyway), scrollable and searchale like the Database list currently is. Or it might be better to let Admins “promote” individual fields to be “Visible in search filter”, e.g. a simple toggle like “Let non-creators add new options” in multi-selects. Either way it might look something like this:
Now that looks like a powerful search function! (of course there should probably be separators on the right side, maybe with titles to make clear what are “global” filter fields, what are DB-specific, etc.) And note that, at least as far as I can see, you haven’t lost anything from the current design, in fact if you want to you could even show the Database filter selection (dropdown) open/expanded by default, to hint that that’s the place to start for filtering. Although you’d want some way to also show that there are other filterable fields. Maybe limit the height of the expanded (but vertically scrollable) Database list…
Bonus points if you can figure out a way to use some sensible interpretation of the Filter(s) to Create new entities with those values. (i.e. obviously the creation/modification date wouldn’t be inherited, but perhaps any inheritable field value would be)
Double bonus points if Database selection for filtering can allow multiple DBs.
I feel like the idea of this connects more generally with a couple of newer UI/UX conventions that I think have been a real revelation for many, some of which Fibery has adopted, others which it hasn’t. In this case it’s turning Search into something of a “Super search”, with extra “powers”. Other examples of things that make it so much quicker to get real work done are / (slash) menus and “command palettes”. I’d love to see Fibery add the latter one day, but that’s a separate feature request.
Killing Multiple Birds with One Big Stone
This feature would, I think, help address if not entirely obviate the need for:
as well as the related:
At least in the context of the main search. For auto-complete (e.g. entity link/reference picker) you’d still want some of those improvements.
Obviously this change would be more work than those two, but the net benefits would be far greater I think, and worthwhile.
Other (Somewhat) Related topics
I don’t think either of these existing requests are quite the same, but my request might help address some of these needs too
Search contents of field (different than filter by field contents/status):
Search within collection (this seems probably more difficult to replicate with what I’m proposing above):
I’m glad you are brining up search as it’s such a huge piece when a Fibery instance grows with content, and we use a lot of the power of Fibery to build out our entities with links, etc. and as a result we have a ton of content in here I’d love to see more searchable.
I would like to add my own very needed Index comments in search to this mix, here’s why I think it’s relevant:
You are suggesting in your mock up the ability to choose among ALL an Entities’ fields within search. In reality, Comments are also a field! When I’ve communicated with the Notion support team about their on lack of ability to search comments because they aren’t indexed in Notion either, the will respond telling me that ALL fields in their pages are planned, similar to your suggestion to have things like formula fields, doc names, etc. searchable.
@Eugene_Vabishchevich 's request for Add search by fields is related, as again, Comments are fields. We have a similar situation where we have to write in Rich Text boxes info that really should be in Comments, because you can’t search comments after the fact.
This is also a great post that talks well about some of the need of search, including indexing comments:
Yeah, I did link to those threads, I believe. I’m making a distinction here between the content that is indexed and the ways in which we can control/filter/limit/refine the search on what is indexed. I see a request to “index comments for search” as separate from, though complementary to, the request I made above. Both are important, both can be implemented separately. Although given the huge potential amount of info in comments, implementing filtering before comment indexing might be nice.
Anyway, as a consolation prize I’ve just voted for your request to index contents of comments in search.
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It is in part because Fibery’s search is already pretty good that this problem starts to become as significant as it is.
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(of course there should probably be separators on the right side, maybe with titles to make clear what are “global” filter fields, what are DB-specific, etc.) And note that, at least as far as I can see, you haven’t lost anything from the current design, in fact if you want to you could even show the Database filter selection (dropdown) open/expanded by default, to hint that that’s the place to start for filtering. Although you’d want some way to also show that there are other filterable fields. Maybe limit the height of the expanded (but vertically scrollable) Database list…
(i.e. obviously the creation/modification date wouldn’t be inherited, but perhaps any inheritable field value would be)