Feedback/ Question regarding „Greatly improved feature search for the value relation editor widget“

[lp-dj]

Hi there!

Disclaimer: I haven't been in touch for a while, but I'm still an enthusiastic user of your app and promote and implement it wherever I can! Sorry that I have silently enjoyed all the great developments of the last months and now only report as soon as I have found something worthy of criticism ... Mea culpa!

Background: I'm talking about the behavior when searching for the matching entry in a long list via a Value Relation. In your blog post you write that "QField is now a tiny bit more clever when displaying string searches against long lists". I'm afraid that at this point I have to out myself as a little bit too dumb to understand the mechanism and its advantages ^^

Before the recent changes, it worked perfectly for me. Just have a look at my video from an old issue #2090 around 00:15

Screen_Recording_20210817-161002_QField.mp4

From a very long reference list, I was able to find the appropriate entry via a minimum of characters to enter. In the example "t s r" for "Taraxacum sectio Ruderalia".

For demonstration purposes I have downloaded my mre from back then again and opened it with the current Qfield. See how the search behaves now when trying to find the same entry in the list.

Screen_Recording_20230602-114649.mp4

I don't quite understand the new mechanism when filtering the reference list. Can someone explain to me the logic behind it? Maybe then I will understand the advantages from the new behavior, too. Sometimes I can still somehow make sense of the results, but often the filtering is also a bit strange and, in my opinion, not very helpful.

Currently I miss the old behavior a lot. You have to know: In my field work I have to select very often, a lot of different entries from long lists with about 20.000 entries. This used to work really well and smoothly. Now it has somehow lost its flow...

Is it just me? If so, I would have to bow to the masses ;) But I would be glad if someone can tell me the advantages of the new way before, so that I can also try to win something from it ;)

Best thanks and many greetings!