Extension widget keeps resorting

[jrieken]

See attach recording. The extension viewlet resort while I hover over items. That causes me to select the wrong extension

[joaomoreno]

We don't control the sorting. The Marketplace does. It's hardly a regression.

[jrieken]

In the May release thing clear when retyping and then stuff comes in one by one in the correct order

[sandy081]

To me it looks like new results are shown after typing after a delay which are sorted based on the new filter.

But will investigate, if there are any changes from our side that causing this.

[joaomoreno]

Here's 1.11.2:

[jrieken]

You are not doing what I did (this is the old version)

[joaomoreno]

In the first video you typed g instead of clearing the input.

[jrieken]

true, not a regression. still major mess up. we argue everyone against dynamic updating UI, like in reference search or cmd+o, but here we are doing exactly this. Before re-querying we need to clear the crap

[joaomoreno]

Major mess up that's been there since the beginning. So, hardly important.

[jrieken]

Major mess up that's been there since the beginning. So, hardly important.

I like that logic.

[sandy081]

Removing from June as per discussion in Stand Up

[sandy081]

Not sure what we can do it here worst is to clear the results when a new search is triggered. Some users might like and some does not. This will at least not allow users to select wrong extension.

@joaomoreno ??

[jrieken]

Can't we ask the market place for a downloadable index? There are less than 10000 extensions: a summary with their searchable information (title, label, description) should be small enough to be downloadable and having that we can apply our sorting/filtering that we use throughout the product (and avoid this flashiness)

[joaomoreno]

I believe the Marketplace wants to own the relevance sorting. We also don't want to maintain a relevance sorting ourselves. cc @viradhamMS @pkuma-msft for comments. It would be great if narrowing down a search by adding more characters to the query would minimize resorting.

[sandy081]

we can apply our sorting/filtering that we use throughout the product (and avoid this flashiness)

This will cause inconsistency with Market place website. Not sure if it is a good idea.

[jrieken]

This will cause inconsistency with Market place website. Not sure if it is a good idea.

I think that's a brilliant idea because today the extensions viewlet is the only place in which the sorting is different from anything else in our tool. All the select-by-typing tricks that have made it into my muscle memory don't work in the extensions viewlet and I always leave it frustrated.

[viradhamMS]

@joaomoreno : You are right., the relevance algorithm in Marketplace takes care of downloads, ratings apart from the appropriate weightages given to display name, publisher name, tags, brief description. It wouldn't be a good idea to duplicate the algorithm in the clients. In the near future, we might move to Azure Search or Bing APIs to improve the performance and scalability of the search further. If Clients start duplicating the algorithm, it would be hard to play catch upon such technology moves for better results/performance.

[jrieken]

the relevance algorithm in Marketplace takes care of downloads, ratings apart from the appropriate weightages given to display name, publisher name, tags, brief description.

But all these things don't change while a user types. Having them once and using them for a snappy filtering/sorting will be what we do everywhere else. This is like completions that we request once and then sort/filter using our rules (respecting the information extension gave us, e.g. sortText, filterText, range, etc)

[pkuma-msft]

But all these things don't change while a user types. Having them once and using them for a snappy filtering/sorting will be what we do everywhere else.

Not sure what you mean by this. For example searching for 'test' returns 178 results whereas searching for 'test mocha' returns 180 results. Are you suggesting we download the full catalog to the client and work off of it?

[jrieken]

Are you suggesting we download the full catalog to the client and work off of it?

Yes

[codedChaos]

Just commenting to remind myself to research and elaborate in the morning but has anyone mentioned, or an issue been created around the inefficacy of using two sort filters in a search?

In my years of VS Code extension searches, I typically have tried to improve results by using two sorting metrics. My biggest example is usually something like this:
thing-i-want @sort:rating @sort:ratingcount
I do this because simply sorting by rating returns plenty of 5-star extensions with only one to five actual reviews, which means diddly-squat to me. I want ratings over a 4 with at least a couple dozen reviewers/raters. Is it just me on this?

[vscodenpa]

We closed this issue because we don't plan to address it in the foreseeable future. If you disagree and feel that this issue is crucial: we are happy to listen and to reconsider.

If you wonder what we are up to, please see our roadmap and issue reporting guidelines.

Thanks for your understanding, and happy coding!