[bndtools] Repositories view capability search results don't have repository actions

[rotty3000]

Since search results from capability queries don't have context menu actions associated with them a big opportunity is lost for some nice usability.

Here's just one possible example:

• search for a capability
• result is returned in the view
• right click in context menu of a result
• copy the GAV/Bundle ref and paste it into project

[kriegfrj]

This bugs me all the time too.

While someone looks at this, they could also consider adding search-for-a-class now that we have the capability (excuse the pun).

[pkriens]

Why not add 'pseudo' targets, like I did in the Bndtools Explorer. Then we do not have to go to this completely different view and its strange modality. For example:

      :package foo.bar
      :class FooBar
      :service FooService
      :namespace osgi.wiring.bundle (osgi.wiring.bundle=com.foo.bar)

Easy to implement and maintain

[rotty3000]

That is an interesting proposal. But do we really want to propagate this new syntax? Is it strange to users? It feels hard to intuit from the UI. Good UI (of which I am not a design expert by any means) professes to not require much, if any, documentation to let user intuition figure out how to use it.

I do really like the idea of simplifying the other search feature however.

On Tue, May 19, 2020 at 9:51 AM Peter Kriens [email protected] wrote:

Why not add 'pseudo' targets, like I did in the Bndtools Explorer. Then we do not have to go to this completely different view and its strange modality. For example:

  :package foo.bar
  :class FooBar
  :service FooService
  :namespace osgi.wiring.bundle (osgi.wiring.bundle=com.foo.bar)

Easy to implement and maintain

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[pkriens]

Well, we should not fool ourselves ... I think virtually nobody is using the nice graphic bnd editor because we basically molested the Private-Package & Export-Package functionality it is based on.

But we can do both

[kriegfrj]

Other pieces of lost usability that I have hit recently from this issue:

1. Can't drag a search result from the repository view into a bnd(run) editor. Eg, I tried to run a resolution and found a missing package, so I searched the repository view for the missing package and found a bundle, but then couldn't drag & drop that bundle into the -runrequires pane of my bndrun editor.
2. Can't open the matching bundles in the jar editor with double click (like you can when the bundles are not search results).

[kriegfrj]

Also, it occurred to me (perhaps something to look at in conjunction with this issue) - there's quite a bit of conceptual overlap in functionality between the Repositories view and the repositories pane in the bnd(run) editor. Any functionality we add to the Repositories view for searching would also be useful in the repositories pane for bundle selection for a bnd(run) file. In practice, the functionality has diverged somewhat, and I don't think there's any good usability reason for that (though see below) - mostly it's a byproduct of the fact that they've evolved over divergent code paths. Perhaps we could reclaim some screen realestate (the bnd(run) "Run" tab is quite crowded) by abolishing the repository selection pane. Or at the very least, re-using core parts of it so that any enhancements we make to search functionality are available in both places.

Actually, one thing where having a "customised" repository view on the Run tab might be useful as it can take into account the contents of the -runrepos directive and only show bundles from the enabled repos.

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