Feature Proposal: Add $total(..) to FormattedSearch

Motivation

We lack a way of emitting this format string:

format="Record $index of $total" where it should say, "1 of 4", "2 of 4", "3 of 4", ...

The example is trivial, but we have cases at work where we want to build (non-human) identifiers in the generated markup based on a function of the total number and the $index.

This would also fix the problem that we can't put the search total in the header.

Description and Documentation

Previous discussion at AddNumberOfTopicsToFormattedSearch. I've added SvenDowideit as a contributor as I've borrowed the $param($foo) syntax he mentioned in that discussion.

Some rationalisation of the formatting code might be necessary.

Implement the following:

• $total, $total() - total topics
• $total(group) - total topics in this group (Eg. groupby="web")
• $total(sofar) - topics so far; alias for $ntopics and $index
• $total(groupsofar) - topics so far in this group/web
• $total(hits) - total hits
• $total(grouphits) - total hits in this group/web
• $total(hitssofar) - total hits so far; alias for $nhits
• $total(grouphitssofar) - total hits so far in this group/web

Examples

Impact

Implementation

-- Contributors: PaulHarvey - 17 Jan 2011, SvenDowideit

Discussion

No objections. Excellent?

-- PaulHarvey - 05 Feb 2011

there might be one small issue...

you might need to make it $total(group), so that it doesn't get pre-evaled mistakenly (and tbh, i think it might make more sense to allow both format evals inside the braces and named values as in the spec above.

and if there's a possibilty of $total(cells(above),) and $total(cells(column)) etc we might be able to do away with some CALC

yes, I did BikeShed? - ignore the idea unless you happen to notice its magically doable - or toss a comment in the code where you think it'd go.. (cos the unit tests will be monstrous)

-- SvenDowideit - 05 Feb 2011

I had wondered about that. I've removed the dollars. Reset the date again.

The number of macros I'm maintaining which do header/format/footer is saddening. Doing TopicRecursePlugin gave me some ideas.

-- PaulHarvey - 06 Feb 2011

yes, likewise - I almost extracted the Seach::FormatResults code into a Func yesterday for the same reason

-- SvenDowideit - 06 Feb 2011