Amarok/Proposals/MultipleCollections

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Multiple Collections

Sven423 said:

Many users, including myself, would love to see multiple collection support in amaroK. The reasons for having or not having multiple collections have been hashed out on the development list; this page aims to inform as to thoughts, design, and status of multiple collection support within amaroK.

Currently,this is still in the design and planning phase. My current plan is as follows:

  • In the Collection options pane, replace the file selector and the options (import playlists, etc.) with a table (QTable) with the following columns: Name of Collection, Enabled/Disabled (checkbox), and Edit. Users can add and remove rows (collections) as they will.
  • Clicking the edit cell for a particular row spawns a dialog box with a file selector and several options checkboxes -- the same widgets as are currently present in the Options menu. In this way, users can individually select options for each collection (whether to auto-update or not, etc), but the interface is kept fairly neat.
  • Enabling or disabling collections would load them into or unload them from the current meta-collection, consisting of the set of all enabled collections.
  • The different collections would be handled on the backend by different tables in the database.
  • Finally, the user could opt to have a dialog box open on each startup of amaroK, allowing the user to select which collections to enable or disable.

I believe that this design will allow ease of use (easy to enable and disable collections on the fly) with the ability to maximize existing code use for creating, updating, and working with collections. Hopefully, this approach will generate a feature that is intuitive and simply, and above all, of great value to the user.

Donmiguel said:

So, three years later, has anything been decided about this topic? I personally still think it would be a great feature to have different collections that can be enabled and disabled!