Transcripts in Spark do not show recent messages

Ok, pagination then.

You can test that issue by changing the maximumHistory in spark.properties or the maxsize in ChatTranscriptPlugin to a small size. You wont find any entries if their index is beyond that maximum.

To change the order for display, you could change the set_viceVersa tag. I’ve did a bit testing in that part.

Ok i made two patches:

spark-1407_GUI_option.patch - this will provide the option to change the history message limit

spark-1407_pagination_dateDesc.patch - this will provide pagination with the specific history limit and order by date descending

What do you think?

I guess, to reduce the loadtime, its an option to lower the history limit.

@Mike

Any sucess with the editorkit?
spark-1407_GUI_option.patch.zip (1936 Bytes)
spark-1407_pagination_dateDesc.patch.zip (5440 Bytes)

I do like the pagination approach. Can we make the limit for loaded history items based on shown days? eg it show the history of the last week for a chat partner? Since the history XML stores the date, we would page week by week. This is a nice way and we would not need the limit patch.

Ok, i changed it in that way. Its now week by week.

edit

After a bit of testing, i’m not that sure that the new direction for the messages is that good… it makes the conversation hard to follow, what do you think? Maybe we should keep the direction and change to pagination?
spark-1407_pageByWeek.patch.zip (6226 Bytes)

Can’t apply the last patch, fails in Netbeans. But i do like pagination by a preset number of entries. Week by week will generate thousands of pages (few years history) if i understand right.

Since history is a per user feature a week by week will produce not thousand lines per user.

I can’t comment on Netbeans. However, the internal build with this patch has an error. It is not working in the chat window and should be considered to be incomplete.

If i have a few years history with someone and if i chat a few times per week with him, then it will have ~60 pages of history (week by week). Though, if it is only a few lines per week, it will fit on one page of history with a limit of 200 say and will load fairly quick.

exactly, and this would definitely happen to me.

possible pagination values

Today

Yesterday

Last Week

Last Month

Older (having to click “load more…” every 500 messages)

With search being able to search the entire history of messages.

You are missing the search functionality in your consideration. If you browse though old history, its most likely to be related to a certain buzz word like “HTTP” or “bug”. Apparently the history XML can be parsed quickly. Maybe it is an idea to have a calculation of the time that has passed for 500 messages and use that time as an idicator for the pagination e.g 500 messages in 30 days make a month pagination and 500 messages in 7 days a week by week pagination.

where am I missing the search functionality (oh and sorry meant to hit reply and accidentally hit the correct answer button!)

Also, why does it matter how many messages transpired between two specific dates.

Pagination should be based on something that is humanly comfortable. I don’t care that i sent 500 messages, but I remember telling my buddy something about going to dinner “Last Week” not 320 messages ago.

I’m saying to paginate on values that are palatable to people and will be easily understood, and create a search that allows you to search the entire history of messages. Which makes sense.

I can browse these forums pages at a time, or search the entire history of these forums if need be.

Search in these forums should never be taken as an example… horrible… Actually i agree with Mike. It can be Today, yesterday, last week, last month, etc.

The history window has a search and that search is always working on the full history file (AFAIK).

The whole topic steams from the fact that large histories load very slowly. The pagination solves that one. We may have pagination for something like last 500 messages or for a time. We are currently blocking history loading for more than 5000 lines (if I remember correctly). So something like 500 sounds sensible to me. Since history is usually something related to time, I was suggesting a time period pagination. By week seems to be to small, although my judgement is, that people that look into history in a scolling mode will scroll for a couple of days or wek but not years. For something really “long time ago” you will usually remember a key word of the conversation.

Can we agree on month/week switch and pagination by month as default? How should serch work? A secondary result screen showing the 10 message above and below the result and separating the results by horizontal lines?

That’s me, who occasionally scrolls years history I’m fine with month pagination. Also i’m fine with the current search.

There was an error in the patch if you try to open the transcript in the chat window, this is fixed in the new patch.

So we stay by paging with last week/month?
spark-1407_pageByWeek2.patch.zip (4580 Bytes)

If nobody replies, than i say, yes, we can go with last week/month.

no complaints from me!

any comments on the patch provided by Tim? Should he commit to the SVN?

The last patch is not clear to me. How it divides the history? I now see 81 pages in stead of ~20. But i see the same < and > buttons. Is it first showing one week and if i click > it shows the last month and so on? Maybe we should have more buttons to make it clear? Or not?

Ok, i’d worked a bit on the patch.

Now you can select time periods of one week, three weeks and one month.

I guess, the look is not yet final and i’m still testing a with old transcripts and different timezones, maybe that could cause bugs.

But here is the patch and i’d like to get some suggestions
spark-1407_3_OrderOptions.patch.zip (8660 Bytes)

Can you explain better how every setting works? because if i select week.three it shows every message on the new page (1400 pages).