Make the collection tree view configurable

+1

One example why the current non-configurable view is annoying is when having sampler albums where multiple artists are present with their title on one CD. If you want to browse these albums you would typically select "Album", then select the album, but when you then expand the album tree, only the titles are shown, but not the artist names! You have to open the tag editor or add everything to the playlist first just to see what Artists are present on that album. Yikes.

Yes, this would be great :)

No configurable sorting yet (I might sit down and try adding this somewhere down the line) but this patch will fix the problem where sorting by album didn't then sort by artist, and instead went straight to sorting by track.

+1 for the configurable tree view !
It would be great because I really would like my tree appears like this : {genre}/{artist album}/{year} - {album}/{CD number} - {track number} - {title} ({artist singer})
Not very simple :P

It would be great to create a special album type like Amarok's "collection" type, for albums with no specific artist album (soundtracks, singles collections,...).
Then, this one would appear like this (for me) : {genre}/{album}/{CD number} - {track number} - {title} ({artist singer})

:)

I've created a patch that makes collection tree more configurable (not yet in the ui though)
I've changed one of the default views 'Artist - Year - Album' to 'Artist - (Year - Album)' so that the year of the album is displayed together with it's name
That's just an example, most of requests from previous comments are also easy-to-do

The idea of the patch is that in each level of the tree we specify:
- list of tags, by which tracks are grouped at this level
- something like string mask - value, displayed in the nodes at this value
For example: tags are Year, Album, mask is '%1 - %2' (so displayed value is something like '1975 - Physical Graffiti'

Patch attached (my tree is at revision 2685 now - the latest by now)
Screenshot of working exaile with the working functionality also attached

screenshot attachement

by the way, with the patch tracks in the albums nodes are first sorted by disc number, then by track number
(Metallica fans will see that at the screenshot)

Very interesting approach Vladimir! That does a pretty good job of encompassing everything we want to do here without dramatically increasing code complexity. If anything it makes it simpler by eliminated the hard-coded edge cases for tracknumber and such. Appears to work just fine for me too.

I'm going to give the other Exaile devs a chance to look at this before we commit this because of how core the collection panel is to Exaile, but everything looks good to me. Great work!

here's one more patch

it fixes display of unicode names in tree
my previous patch has broken that
that's caused by some magic (xl.collection.search requires non-unicode string)

added trunk/2690

I'm sorry but is the feature to "make the collection tree view configurable" implemented ?

I only see the new Vladimir Kokarev's tree view, but how configure a new personal view ?
Is this feature accessible to users too or only to developpers (by modifying exaile .ui files) ?

If it's only accessible by modifying .ui files - stored in file system -, are changes kept after an exaile update ?