www.auctionsieve.com

[Jim Dandy]

Hi,

I’ve been using AS for quite a while now and it’s definitely proved a great tool for increasing the size of my 45 record collection. So much so that I’ve got a problem now. I’ve got so many searches (at least 300) that the result window is becoming tinier and tinier at the bottom of the screen since there doesn't seem to be a vertical scrollbar. This is definitely not very convenient for browsing the results, besides I’m afraid if I add any more searches it will completely disappear .

As for the « sieves » drop down menu, it doesn’t seem to work. It shows the first 36 entries but disappears as soon as I scroll with my mouse.
What I’m going to do for now is try and make the sieve names shorter in order to gain some space, but I’m wondering if there is a better way to organize my searches.
Is there something I’m missing ?

To give you a better idea of what I'm talking about, here's a link to a screen print of my auction sieve window :

https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-kp1cuYvh6-0/T76oIpOaLlI/AAAAAAAABpQ/TjLTyP4yutg/s912/ASscreen.jpg

Thanks for your help,

[nev]

Wow!
Thanks for the screenshot - it really helped me understand the problem.

Ok, there are a few things you can do.

First - tagging
Click on 'Options' next to the 'Get auctions' button.
A panel drops down with all the extra search options and some other options on the right.
Over on the right is a field called Menu tags.
Type something in there - think of some way you could group a bunch of sieves together, perhaps by genre or maybe some other way, with tags like important or rare.
Do that for a bunch of sieves and now look at the Sieves menu. If you marked a bunch of sieves with the tag 'important', you'll now see a sub-menu in the Sieves menu called 'important' and all those sieves will be under that sub-menu.

Second - you can close tabs. Right-click on a tab and select close. Or just middle-click on the tab.
You can also select Tabs->Close all sieves
If you've grouped sieves together with tags like 'important', you can then go to the Sieves menu and select the 'important' sub-menu and select 'Open all'.

There's one further thing you can do - combine searches into one sieve.
When you click on the 'Options' button, in the panel that drops down, there's a button 'Add extra searches'. That pops up a screen where you can specify a bunch of searches. When you 'Get auctions' for that sieve, it will perform the searches one after the other and combine all the results together.

Hope that's all understandable. I should really do a blog post with screen shots.

Let me know how you go!

[Jim Dandy]

Hi Nev,

Thanks for your quick reply. I was really happy with the menu tags solution and I grouped all my searches in 3 groups ("01", "02", "03") containing roughly 100 searches each. The idea was to get about 10 lines of sieves so as to have enough space below to browse the results.

Once I was done grouping the searches, I closed all the sieves, went to the "sieves" drop down menu, and realized I couldn't open them because I can't scroll down, so I can't click on "open all". (see link to new screen shot below). Maybe it would be good to be able to scroll down that menu.
https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-CPGVosVrqu8/T78xhEW-qHI/AAAAAAAABpc/LfjK4-fH6Zs/s912/ASscreen2.jpg

So now I'm in the process of opening the sieves I can open one by one and putting them in new groups ("04", "05", etc.) since it seems I can only put roughly 35 sieves in each group if I want to be able to open them all at a time.
I Don't know if that's very clear (English is not my native tongue, sorry).
Anyway, this is going to work eventually, but it's gonna take a little while !
Thanks,

[nev]

Hi Jim,

All perfectly clear - your English is great!

Not being able to scroll the menus is a pain - it's a long-standing problem with Java (the language I use to program AuctionSieve). Sorry about that.

Sounds like you're well on the way to making it work.

Nev