After the resource renaming effort, it has been found that the search results page no longer displays the results in a way that is suitable for the new style resource names. Several amendments have been identified to improve the situation:
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drop the "Category" and "Plugin" columns
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merge type with name
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This would remove the ability to sort the results by type but would increase the readability of the results.
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rename "Name" column to "Resource"
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This only makes sense if resource name and type are merged together.
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include type information of parents
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rename "Parent" column to "Location"
EDIT: The 4 variants below are obsoleted by the 2 new placed below them. Both of the new ones enhance the original variant 3 (Type merged everywhere except singletons).
EDIT: The bottom two variants are expanded upon on standalone pages with more screenshots to illustrate various "situations" on the results page. See strategies.
Type Merged Everywhere
This is represents all the bullet-points presented above. The type name is merged with the resource name and parents include the type name as well.
Type Merged Into Parents
This variant leaves the resource type as a standalone column.
Type Merged Everywhere Except Singletons
Following the logic in the left navigation tree where the singletons are not nested under an otherwise implicit autogroup, the resource type information is redundant in the search results as well.
Type Merged Into Parents Except Singletons
The resource type is left as a standalone column, the parents include the type information except for singleton parents for which it shouldn't be needed.
Type Merged Everywhere Except Singletons - type after name
This is an enhanced version of the original variant. The screenshot below illustrates the situation where both type and plugin disambiguation is needed. The plugin name would not be present if it wasn't needed.
Type Merged Everywhere Except Singletons - type before name
The same as above, only the type (and optionally the plugin) name are placed before the resource name.
Different Disambiguation Strategies for "Type Merged Everywhere Except Singletons"
Looking at the screenshots above and playing with various search results, I found that the way the results were presented wasn't ideal. Namely the disambiguation worked in a kind of all or nothing manner meaning that if there were just 2 resources found on the page that needed disambiguated, all of the rows were augmented with more information even though the rest of the rows would be perfectly unique.
I tried to change this and in the process could get rid of the very nasty native query that was previously used to determine the number of parents needed for a set of results to become mutually unique. Now all the parents are always obtained for all the resources in the list and the disambiguation is then computed in Java by finding the "mutually ambiguous" sub lists in the results and disambiguating those one by one (further subdividing those lists as more ambiguous subgroups are found as the process moves up the resource's ancestry).
Below are the four strategies for disambiguation that differ in the amount of (redundant yet potentially useful) information presented to the user on the results page.
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Minimum disambiguation info shows only the very minimum of data to be able to distinguish between the resources on the results page. I don't consider this a useful option but it can serve as a starting point.
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At least one parent always shows at least one parent of the resources on the page, even if they aren't necessary to disambiguate the resources. This strategy is the most similar to what the disambiguation used to look like in the previous iterations.
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Ancestry up to the top-most server always shows all the parents of all the results but the platform (the platform is only shown when needed).
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All Parents always shows the complete path to the resources in the results.
In addition to those a small visual variant was suggested by John Sefler. The idea is not to include the additional type information as part of the link to the resource as illustrated on the screeshot below.
Old Resource Names In New Search Results
When upgrading from previous versions of RHQ, the inventory will contain the resources with the old style resource names. The disambiguated results will therefore look "strange" with quite a lot of information duplicated between the type and the resource name. Some screenshots to illustrate this:
