Library Search Extensions in 7.15 Beta 2
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Instead of adding a title to the search string of a collection, just directly add the desired book to the collection (by dragging a book from the library). This is more accurate anyway, since multiple books could share the same title.
That's fine for personal use, but such collections can't be shared.
This is my personal Faithlife account. On 1 March 2022, I started working for Faithlife, and have a new 'official' user account. Posts on this account shouldn't be taken as official Faithlife views!
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Mark Barnes said:
That's fine for personal use, but such collections can't be shared.
I created a collection just by dragging some resources to "Plus these resources", and had no problems sharing that collection via documents.logos.com. Are you seeing something different?
Andrew Batishko | Logos software developer
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Instead of adding a title to the search string of a collection, just directly add the desired book to the collection (by dragging a book from the library). This is more accurate anyway, since multiple books could share the same title.
If you look at the dozens of public collections I shared (started with "Collection—"), where each of them contains thousands of titles, do you think it is practical to accomplish this using drag and drop? Even copy and paste it dozen times to create the collection make me feel tired (that's why I didn't created more.)
And about accuracy, I knew that this isn't accurate because even double quoted string can return more than one match. That's why I replied to the reply you gave me—this is a use case of an exact match syntax. Better yet, provide something that can match the resourceId to guarantee the match (because titles might not be able to uniquely identifies a resourceId.)
Recall elsewhere everyone is opposing writing to db, the search query is the only legitimate "entry point" to create something. The idea is that one can obtain (read from db, metadata from resourceId, etc.) information, but how to apply (write them back, creating something) them? There has to be a way to feed them back. Since writing db is a taboo then the next logical thing is to find somewhere else that this information can be applied back to the Library in some way, and currently the only way is through collection creation using query syntax. Given my original request (that all search query syntax has a corresponding braces syntax for exact match) isn't that crazy of an idea (if nothing but just for language uniformity), which can be also be used to avoid writing db, I really hope that you can reconsider 1035808.aspx and implement it. (And also consider providing exact match for resourceId.)
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Mark Barnes said:
That's fine for personal use, but such collections can't be shared.
In fact the collections shared by "Logos Resource Collections" is exactly doing that. If you opened one of them, there's hundreds to thousands of resources in the "drag and drop" area.
The problem is that no one in the right mind would drag and drop thousands of resources, not to mention they would likely lost track and made error at some point. I bet the Faithlife employee(s) who created those "Logos Resource Collections" isn't using drag and drop but done programmatically. All I ask is for them to grant me the ability to do things like this programmatically. While one can't them to let me use the same tool they used to create them, I'm asking for a search query syntax precise enough to accomplish exactly the same task.
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I created a collection just by dragging some resources to "Plus these resources", and had no problems sharing that collection via documents.logos.com. Are you seeing something different?
I can confirm it should work, e.g. by browsing those created by "Logos Resource Collections". (What don't they continue to do that anymore? If they do then I don't have to do what I did...)
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Kolen Cheung said:
Better yet, provide something that can match the resourceId to guarantee the match (because titles might not be able to uniquely identifies a resourceId.)
The way we've chosen to allow you to guarantee a match and uniquely specify a resource for a collection is to add it to the "Plus these resources" box.
Kolen Cheung said:If you look at the dozens of public collections I shared (started with "Collection—"), where each of them contains thousands of titles, do you think it is practical to accomplish this using drag and drop?
It's not. Don't do that. It's probably also slower for the program to evaluate this collection than just using the "Plus these resources" box.
Kolen Cheung said:All I ask is for them to grant me the ability to do things like this programmatically
Use multi-select (shift and ctrl keys) in your library to select the resources you want. Then choose the "Save as Collection" option in the Info pane to create a new collection from those resources.
Andrew Batishko | Logos software developer
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Use multi-select (shift and ctrl keys) in your library to select the resources you want. Then choose the "Save as Collection" option in the Info pane to create a new collection from those resources.
Can you show how you can create a collection like this by this example: https://www.logos.com/product/170219/unfiltered and tell us how much time it takes for you to do that?
To give you an idea on the collection rules and how impractical to do it by hand, see this: https://gist.github.com/ickc/bac55b5b6bf9ac0f25833aed1e8fedf9 . This file is big with 4000~5000 collection rules. But even for the personal version of this of collections I owned, it stills have 200~300 collection rules where each of them can has as much as hundreds~thousands titles.
It's not. Don't do that. It's probably also slower for the program to evaluate this collection than just using the "Plus these resources" box.
Sorry but I heard enough of "Don't do that." I am making feature requests and for now make do with what Logos currently offered (which ain't going to piss people off by say writing to db.)
There are obviously ways to make it at least as fast as using the "Plus these resources" box. But new query search capability is needed to be given to achieve that. And given the then new "Library Search Extensions" is created exactly to make certain scenarios more performant (which are some unexpected use case from the dev. originally), I don't see why not enhance the search syntax to make situations like this better.
And honestly, going back to 1035808.aspx, rather than thinking this and that is not needed and therefore not implemented (i.e. waiting for a need to exist before implementations), things like that should be implemented at the beginning of this new syntax, just to make this new syntax more uniform (i.e. no surprises like some are supported by this new syntax and some are not.)
(Please also consider adding an exact search for resourceId.)
Thanks.
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And frankly I am surprised by the hostility towards people wanting to do things differently. Yes, something might be doable currently with GUI and clicking and dragging, but 1) not every body like to click and drag that much 2) things can easily goes out of hands as clicking and dragging doesn't scale very well.
If something is asking a lot of your time to serve a very niche market making it not economically feasible and I completely understand why Faithlife won't put the resource in doing that (I'm looking at Logos for Linux.)
But if something is reasonable, within reach of what Faithlife/Logos is currently offering (i.e. to make the brace search syntax behaving uniformly), 1) I don't think it is asking too much 2) if it is there got to explanations why this is too difficult to implement rather than just dodging it by claiming it is not necessary.
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Kolen Cheung said:
Sorry but I heard enough of "Don't do that."
Please forgive me. I should not have said it like that. I think it would have been better for me to have said: "I agree. That sounds very impractical, but there is an easier way to accomplish this right now."
Although I see now that you are using a programmatic method to build the search string, so my suggestion doesn't actually help your specific use case at all.
Kolen Cheung said:(Please also consider adding an exact search for resourceId.)
UserVoice might be a good place to raise the visibility of your suggestion.
Andrew Batishko | Logos software developer
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Mark Barnes said:
That's fine for personal use, but such collections can't be shared.
I created a collection just by dragging some resources to "Plus these resources", and had no problems sharing that collection via documents.logos.com. Are you seeing something different?
I looked for the collection you shared, but couldn't find it. I thought, however, that the "Plus these resources" and "Minus these resources" sections are ignored when you share a collection. But as Kolen says, the Faithlife-created collections from 2014 manage to do this, so perhaps I'm wrong. It's hard to tell without a separate installation in a different username (which I don't have at the moment.)
I've created a collection of 10 resources that you can test: https://documents.logos.com/documents/294e41bc6ba2417fb0b80e420ed79dba/details
This is my personal Faithlife account. On 1 March 2022, I started working for Faithlife, and have a new 'official' user account. Posts on this account shouldn't be taken as official Faithlife views!
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Kolen Cheung said:
If you look at the dozens of public collections I shared (started with "Collection—"), where each of them contains thousands of titles, do you think it is practical to accomplish this using drag and drop? Even copy and paste it dozen times to create the collection make me feel tired (that's why I didn't created more.)
If you want to accomplish this, the best way of doing so at the moment is to copy/paste your string in the library, and the save the resulting list as a collection. This will only work, of course, if you own (and haven't hidden) all the resources from that collection.
This is my personal Faithlife account. On 1 March 2022, I started working for Faithlife, and have a new 'official' user account. Posts on this account shouldn't be taken as official Faithlife views!
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Kolen Cheung said:
And frankly I am surprised by the hostility towards people wanting to do things differently. Yes, something might be doable currently with GUI and clicking and dragging, but 1) not every body like to click and drag that much 2) things can easily goes out of hands as clicking and dragging doesn't scale very well.
Can I give you a personal perspective? I don't think you've been shown any hostility. Disagreement ≠ hostility.
I have appreciated your engagement over the last few months (and your recent help via DM!). Some of the things that are also important to you are important to me. But at times I've also found it difficult to engage with you, because sometimes you have given the impression that you are here to give your opinion rather than listen to others' opinions. There's no rule against just doing the former – but I think you'll find doing the latter much more constructive.
My experience has been that the best way to get change from Faithlife is to engage constructively, and to demonstrate the value of a change. The fact these Library Search Extensions even exist is mostly due to Andrew Baguley's Theology/Denomination Tags (first written in 2012) and my Commentary Collection Rules (first written in 2014). Their popularity (and the resulting speed complaints from users!) was a major factor in this syntax being added a year ago.
That improvement took a long time, and I wish it had been shorter. But eventually Faithlife were able to allocate resources because they knew many customers would benefit.
Your collections could be a real benefit to customers — but we don't know that yet. But if you can take on board Faithlife's perspective, and demonstrate the usefulness of what you want to achieve, I'm sure you'll find Faithlife much more responsive.
This is my personal Faithlife account. On 1 March 2022, I started working for Faithlife, and have a new 'official' user account. Posts on this account shouldn't be taken as official Faithlife views!
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Hi Mark
Mark Barnes said:I've created a collection of 10 resources that you can test: https://documents.logos.com/documents/294e41bc6ba2417fb0b80e420ed79dba/details
If I take a copy of that I get this - which I guess shows this works
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Graham Criddle said:
If I take a copy of that I get this - which I guess shows this works
Thanks, that's great to know. I'll delete the test collection now.
This is my personal Faithlife account. On 1 March 2022, I started working for Faithlife, and have a new 'official' user account. Posts on this account shouldn't be taken as official Faithlife views!
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Mark Barnes said:
sometimes you have given the impression that you are here to give your opinion rather than listen to others' opinions
There are cases others' opinions helped (mostly because they reveal something I don't know.) But there are cases that people expressed opinion in a way that's more like a rule (like don't write to db, not the way you put it but some others has), or like there exists a certain way of doing that hence change not needed, or like someone trying to established authority (a certain MVP claimed their background in programming, and also said why others who might have much more experience in database doesn't do what I was proposing, etc. These are all trying to use authority to silence people.)
Hostility might not be the right word, but more like opposition. It's like an opposition to change and also a bias on the existing way of doing things is good enough.
Another thing is just cultural. The Logos community is more like people telling Logos what they need and then Logos decides if they should put resource and how, etc. i.e. as many proprietary softwares does. But relying on Logos alone to provide what one needs is dangerous which is a lesson I learnt as a Logos user. E.g. Bob promised reverse interlinear in PBB almost a decade ago and the feature got killed. Logos base packages as collection in Library is Logos 5 only. And also the recent trait thing. The change of mindset I have is that I shouldn't rely on them to give me what I need. It's great if they do, but one can't rely on that because a promise in the future might not be realized or might be in the far future. Ie it is a DIY approach to try to use whatever existing ways to accomplish something right now, but not waiting for an indefinite future.
Speaking of this DIY approach, I first thought it was writing to db but obviously by popular opposition I need to think about something else. And the new idea is to use the search query syntax to bridge this gap (ie the program output a search string as an "interface" to Logos to create something.) But this idea isn't perfect because the search query cannot provide an exact match to a resource (where the title is the current best), hence the feature request here.
Since I talked about the cultural thing here, I think the Logos box is quite dangerous. Ie one can only accomplish what Logos tools can help you to accomplished. Here's another example: I can't even do a simple word count on a resource (I might be wrong and I hope so.) So E.g. when setting a reading plan, if I want to project how long I might need to finish a book before deciding the time span, it can't be done (except when this info on that book exists somewhere else.) While one can argue that this is true to most if not all proprietary software, in the case of Logos it is much more severe, because the content/dataset that it has might not exist elsewhere. Ie I could be all philosophical and embrace open source, non-DRM alternatives only but they wouldn't give me the same titles, or the datasets. An example of what information might be revealed from the dataset is no. of sentences according to LDGNT and even its distribution across books, average no of words per sentence, etc. This is something that I love to know, but for obvious reasons Logos won't provide a tool to do that, and hence it cannot be done even if I want to know it.
P.S. I really hate piracy and without such there won't be DRM and many of the problems above won't be a problem. I'm very surprised that even when we're talking about Bible Software people will pirate and has pirated when it is possible.
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Kolen Cheung said:
Here's another example: I can't even do a simple word count on a resource (I might be wrong and I hope so.)
The Concordance Tool does this for you
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Reading through this thread, Gal 5:22 came to my mind. I hope we can display these fruits also in the way we communicate on the Forum.
But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.
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Kolen Cheung said:
These are all trying to use authority to silence people.
Again, I really don't think anyone has sought to silence you. What people have tried to do is to stop you damaging — perhaps irreparably — your Logos user data.
Kolen Cheung said:It's like an opposition to change and also a bias on the existing way of doing things is good enough.
No-one on these forums thinks that. Everyone wants Logos to be better, and we all have our pet areas where we think development time should be spent. What you've found is that some of the areas you're concerned about are different from the areas that others are concerned about.
Kolen Cheung said:The Logos community is more like people telling Logos what they need and then Logos decides if they should put resource and how, etc. i.e. as many proprietary softwares does.
I understand that perspective. All the code I personally write is open source. But it's incredibly unlikely that at this stage Faithlife are going to fully jump on the open source bandwagon, even less the free software one.
Kolen Cheung said:An example of what information might be revealed from the dataset is no. of sentences according to LDGNT and even its distribution across books, average no of words per sentence, etc. This is something that I love to know, but for obvious reasons Logos won't provide a tool to do that, and hence it cannot be done even if I want to know it.
Lots of us would love to get our hands on data like that. I think it will come — eventually. The Bible Browser and Morph Query is one example of recent improvements in better integrating different datasets and provided tools for us to use them. But I agree, there's a long way to go.
This is my personal Faithlife account. On 1 March 2022, I started working for Faithlife, and have a new 'official' user account. Posts on this account shouldn't be taken as official Faithlife views!
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Mark Barnes said:
If you want to accomplish this, the best way of doing so at the moment is to copy/paste your string in the library, and the save the resulting list as a collection. This will only work, of course, if you own (and haven't hidden) all the resources from that collection.
I tried this but there's currently 2 problems in this approach:
- Impossible to update a current collection. This is problematic if something is shared publicly and needs to be updated later. It won't be a problem if there's a way to be certain the collection created is 100% correct but given the current search syntax cannot uniquely identify a resource it is impossible (to be 100% correct.)
- If the search string is too long, something like below can happen and I don't have a way to select the titles. So currently anything at or above Gold is not created using this method.
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Graham Criddle said:
The Concordance Tool does this for you
Thanks for the revelation! I started a thread recently asking for this but no one told me that... (well the context was to create a reading plan according to word count so apparently people didn't think about giving this as a make do answer.)
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Mark Barnes said:
Lots of us would love to get our hands on data like that. I think it will come — eventually. The Bible Browser and Morph Query is one example of recent improvements in better integrating different datasets and provided tools for us to use them. But I agree, there's a long way to go.
I've thought about using the print function to output to HTML/docx and then parsed the data there. But printing is also quite handicapped (designed against piracy again) to output full book, let alone full library. But looking e.g. at the HTML output from reverse interlinear the result is so presentational making it not much of a value and difficult to parse. And also much of the underlying info is lost in printing.
The only way to truly liberate the datasets we "owned" is to have access to the source. But DRM make this a no go. I kind of hoped some sort of API can communicate with Logos to obtain this. But it doesn't seem to do that. (And obviously they have no plan to improve on this regard either.)
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Armin said:
Reading through this thread, Gal 5:22 came to my mind. I hope we can display these fruits also in the way we communicate on the Forum.
But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.
Feeling is mutual.
c.f. https://community.logos.com/forums/t/10072.aspx
Please treat each other with the love, courtesy, respect, and kindness that you would if you were sitting in your living room together.
If people reflect on this, may be they will find out discussing in the Logos forum doesn’t feel like “sitting in your living room together.”
There’s often so much friction to discuss something here. The forum policing thing is the worst experience because there’s no clear, unambiguous guidelines and every now and then people like to volunteer to judge. But often time if no one is judging the on-going conversation should have settled by themselves. (This is the part that doesn’t feel like a living room, more like undercover cops surrounding you and prepare to engage any time.)
Another problem is people can be subjective here. Even one MVP who keeps reminding people to welcome each other, not insulting one group or another is quite subjective. This is another point where it doesn’t feel like “sitting in your living room together”. It is as if everyone here is to give a political speech and anything nor politically correct is, well, corrected.
However I digress. And I’m not ready to open a thread discussing this. It is a cultural problem in this forum and unfortunately some long time Logos forum members might have set the culture and it is hard to change. And I also don’t think anyone starting any thread like this are going to help. They will just be another guy trying to dictate something. The best way is just for everyone to stop judging, and don’t reply at all to those who judge (difficult to do.)
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Kolen Cheung said:
unfortunately some long time Logos forum members might have set the culture and it is hard to change
Actually, the forums have changed their culture dramatically over the past view years - for the better, the much better. Those who remember the past are the most apt to follow the last guideline ... even when it annoys those who are pushing the boundaries of 1, 2, or 3.
Phil Gons (Faithlife) said:Please abide by the following guidelines as you interact on our forums.
- Please keep your discussions focused on Logos Bible Software: our software, products, websites, company, tools, etc.
- Please do not discuss or debate biblical, theological, or other controversial topics. Use one of the many web forums intended for these kinds of discussions.
- Please treat each other with the love, courtesy, respect, and kindness that you would if you were sitting in your living room together.
- Please do not use our forums to
- sell or give away anything or link to anything you’re selling or giving away—including Logos products
- promote or link to competitors
- point people to other places that sell Logos-compatible products
- advertise yourself, your business, your ministry, your website, etc. (a tasteful link in your forum signature is acceptable)
- post Logos Coupon Codes. If you are aware of a special promotion Logos is running online, you are welcome to link directly to the promotion.
- Please search before posting. It’s likely that someone has already asked your question.
- Please help others follow these guidelines. If the problems continue after you’ve given a gentle reminder of these expectations, please click “Report Abuse” under “More” or send an email to forums@logos.com.
Thank you for your cooperation. Enjoy discussing and learning about Logos Bible Software.
Also remember that people have history on the forums that is not readily apparent when you first become active. Examples:
- one individual with serious health issues sometimes had his judgment impaired by his medications ... when he was obviously impaired, I would tell him to "go mow the lawn" - a private joke between us that also told him to wait a bit and be sure his judgment had returned to normal
- one individual who would provide long dissertations on his neglected denomination and "demand" resources. His wife told us he had brain damage from a stroke and asked us to indulge his behavior for the sake of the man he had been and for the sake of allowing him to continue to feel part of the community
- one individual who was loudly, virulently anti-Catholic and insisted it was his God-given right to use the forums as a platform. His website was tracked down from one of his guest speaking engagements and the issue was turned over to Faithlife. He dropped off the radar.
- a couple of individuals who are valuable to the community for their suggestions and tips, who get people's dander up quite often ... but they've been around long enough that we know it doesn't escalate ... it's just they're inept socially.
It may look "subjective" and there certainly is an element of subjectivity in determining whether a thread is heading downhill fast or whether the participants will right it themselves. But remember there is history you are unaware of which may be a major factor.
Orthodox Bishop Alfeyev: "To be a theologian means to have experience of a personal encounter with God through prayer and worship."; Orthodox proverb: "We know where the Church is, we do not know where it is not."
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The forum I remembered in the past felt better. But I might have a wrong impression.
But in the recent “incidents“ I think what I saw is that issue hasn’t “gone downhill“ fast enough for anyone to try stopping them. They might have a sense of wrong direction, but people might intervene too early, often just to make the arguments getting much worse. I think we should give people the benefit of doubts and let them continue the discussions and If they have any wrong they might sensed it themselves and even apologized. Only had it becomes out of control someone with authority should help settling it.
It is that living room analogy again, if one see some kids start misbehaving should they intervene immediately to maintain a "nice and warm" living room or just observe and let them play a bit and might be they will turns out be ok. In a living room where "guardian" is everywhere one might just feel too uncomfortable to speak up and leave the room.
On one hand no one want to see another got humiliated in the forum. But rather than hoping everyone be humble and nice to each other, may be we should remind ourselves we all can take a bit of humiliation through which we learn humbleness. It might be sad to see people argues here, the very people deeply interested in God's word, and yet we don't see oneness in them. But on the other hand I think it is too harsh a requirement on Logos forum, that even "singly denominated" church cannot achieve that (ie I'm certain most of you have seen how some argument within a church torn them apart.)
P.S. I think by far the rudeness way to intervene is to throw a verse and said nothing else. It is like they don't even bother to help but to judge, and by quoting the almighty Word they automatically win the argument because that can't be wrong. Regardless if this is really the intention of the one who intervene is, I think it is just a reminder that may be people shouldn't intervene in the first place. I think if they really believe in the Word got to have some faith in the Word inside them, put a little faith in the people who's in a conversation that both parties can figure it out themselves.
Another reason not to intervene is something can be learnt from an argument, sometimes. Like in a thread one is starting to argue something about evolution and you can see one side is trying to be neutral, intellectual, and while they haven't won the argument they definitely has shred lights on the matter that some others didn't know. And through an argument sometimes one see a side that one normally don't think exist and may be both got their eyes opened a bit more. (I certainly got my eye opened on seeing some "superstitious" Christians here. Same Bible but all those different Bible readers.)
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I stand by the guidelines.
Orthodox Bishop Alfeyev: "To be a theologian means to have experience of a personal encounter with God through prayer and worship."; Orthodox proverb: "We know where the Church is, we do not know where it is not."
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MJ. Smith said:
I stand by the guidelines.
The guidelines are up to interpretation though. I don’t quite see how that guidelines can really guide anything honestly because it is quite ambiguous. And often time it is self contradictory (one might emphasized too much on the last point so that another point about being like a living room is not realized, which is my point above. This is certainly a very uncomfortable living room for one to be in.)
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By the way, people are using the Faithlife social network to do things not allowed from the forum such as posting promo codes or selling things, etc. I think it will be very interesting to replace the forum by using Faithlife groups so that non of these forum guidelines has to be obeyed (Not that it has much constraining power given the ambiguity.) Eg some subreddit exists for theological debates or strictly academic (think non-believers) biblical discussions, etc. I love to see them in the Faithlife social network, essentially a playground for taboos in Logos forum (theological debate is fun and edifying, just that it might not be “politically correct” in the form of a supporting forum.)
it will also be a great place for those off topic posts here which technically is violating the forum guidelines. Those off topic posts are an example that people in the community really need something normally disallowed in the forums.
PS typing in Logos forum on iPhone is so tiny. it wasn‘t designed responsively where each letter is as small as an ant. Logos forum experience on the mobile is just painful where the Faithlife version has a native web-ish app which is much nicer. Sadly it doesn’t replace the Logos forum yet. I opened a group on Faithlife called Logos forum unofficial and may be people should start chatting there to have a more living room like experience.
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