[jmarshall]

@rand Al Thor: Yeah - the trouble is that some fields only apply to some "content types". I guess in general people would use them in "or" conditions, so it shouldn't really be too much of a problem, however - the pros outweight the cons.

@J_K_M_A_N: You've identified a key difference between "filter nodes" and "category nodes". Filtered nodes just filter the title list by whatever criteria you specify (i.e. they give you the title list of a particular genre for instance). Category nodes, on the other hand, list all possible values from the chosen category, thus giving a hierarchy. Category is useful for browsing all possible genres, Filter is useful for browsing movies within a predefined (set of) genre(s).

Note that it makes no sense for "filter nodes" to be present inside a particular title level node. They're only allowed on the same level (or higher) than a title level node. Title level nodes only list titles (movies or shows). Thus, filter nodes within themselves wouldn't handle "stacking" all your 007 movies in a title listing of all movies. The "stacking" would have to be handled separately, and to be honest, I'm not sure at this point quite how to handle that - will have a think about it. I'm always concerned about over generalizing to the point where it becomes unmanageable for the user. There's a subtle difference in filtering and stacking: Filtering removes items that don't match the filter, whereas stacking combines items that match the filter, and leaves items that don't match alone.

For the filters/smartplaylists, my thinking is the filters that are applied "on the fly" to a particular listing would basically be made up of a single "rule" as is currently in the smartplaylist editor.

The rule dialog would be enhanced, however. I'm think of a list of all fields that may be filtered on, where you can select the conditions to apply to each field in turn. This allows rules to span several fields, perhaps with a switch to toggle from AND or OR between fields. Clicking on the "genre" field for instance would popup a multiselect dialog allowing you to choose which genres you want included. Multiple selections would be OR, ofcourse. For time based fields you'd have a range you can specify in some way (eg before X, after X, between X and Y). For non-category fields (eg title, plot etc.) it'd be a "contains" or "doesn't contain" thing.

Key points:
* a single "filter" or "rule" encompasses a single condition per field.
* each condition is simplified in some cases (non-category fields either "contains" or "doesn't contain", and enhanced in others (multi-select on category fields).
* some fields we currently have may need dropping in some cases, due to managability (actors for instance are hard to filter on - imagine a multi-select dialog with 10000 actors in it...)

Comments most welcome.

Cheers,
Jonathan