rabelux wrote: ↑Sat Sep 11, 2021 4:55 am
The "advanced search" searches the whole database and not just the section that has been selected, right?
Edit: I found the wiki! May I suggest to either move it to the top navigation bar or put a link somewhere on the main page pointing to the wiki? Something like "upgraders from MM4 look here". There is a big list of all the features MM has and that I know of (that's why I love it) but I felt a little bit lost after upgrading.
I think you would be well excused if you were a lot lost after upgrading.
"the Wiki" ...
you mean this?
That is the online help.
You can access it via the MM5 Help menu.
And it is nicely linked to many of action panels,
like this. You get a direct link to the relevant Help page via the Help icon at the top of the page, or by pressing the F1 key while the panel is open.
IMO it is mostly deficient in explaining the design intent, so it can be hard to get to grip with how things are supposed to work.
Often it quickly gets bogged down in details, and you are left with more questions than answers.
The page covering the Search functions, that I linked to at the top, is an example of this.
MM5 search and filtering is quite powerful, but is also complex.
That page does a spectacularly poor job of explaining it all IMO.
"Advanced search" is global whole database search, as you guessed,
But I think that "advanced" refers to the fact that it is front-ended with a wizard to help you construct the search criteria.
You can get to it various ways, but via the funnel icon is most direct route.
The looking glass is also a global whole database search. It doesn't have a wizard, but if you hover over the search control that the looking glass opens, you will see that there is search syntax allowing you to create more targeted searches.
Contextual search is constrained to the Collection that you currently have open.
It has no icon to open its search bar, which interferes with discoverability at first, but that is a convenience feature later on. ie. it consumes no space in the toolbar, and as long as focus is in the main panel, it is always listening. You activate it by just typing something.
There are a bunch of quirks in how search works, and how your search criteria is interpreted, but these are not documented anywhere.
I dissed the online help above. I think that is earned in some respects, but it is a lot better than we had before. I think that it required a lot of work to get to the current stage, and IMO MM5's design has many little quirks that make good clear simple help an almost impossible task.