Devious Fish
pianod2 music server
profile for Perette at Stack Overflow, Q&A for professional and enthusiast programmers

Predicates

Several commands use a standard predicate form:

[manner] [type] <ID | NAME | LIKE | WHERE> {specifier}
[manner] [type] SOURCE ID {id} <ID | NAME | LIKE | WHERE> {specifier}
[manner] [type] SOURCE TYPE {type} NAME {name} <ID | NAME | LIKE | WHERE> {specifier}

Where

manner :== [AUTHORITATIVE | DISCRETIONARY]

type :== [ANY | ARTIST | ALBUM | SONG | PLAYLIST | GENRE]

Predicates accept item lists (ID, NAME) or are patterns that may match multiple items (LIKE, WHERE).

type does not apply if type is implied by the command. At present, it only applies to LIKE; if omitted when accepted, it is equivalent to ANY.

The predicate types are as follow:

ID
The predicate is a list of IDs of a song, album, artist or playlist.
NAME
The predicate is a list of names of a song, album, artist or playlist (as appropriate for the command).
LIKE
The predicate is a list of phrases. Each is split into words, and matches songs, albums, artists or playlists (as appropriate for the command or as specified by type) which contain all the words in the predicate.
WHERE
The predicate is an expression which matches songs, albums, artists or playlists (as appropriate for the command) in accordance with the expression. See the filter grammar for details.
SOURCE
Allows a specific source to be specified for fulfilling a predicate.

manner has meaning when interpreting predicates against the media manager source.

AUTHORITATIVE
Require all sources execute the query successfully. If any source cannot perform a query because the query exceeds its ability, the command fails.
DISCRETIONARY
Search sources that are capable of the query. If a source can’t perform a query, that source is ignored and results gathered from other sources.

If a source encounters an error (as opposed to a limitation), a discretionary search will still fail.

Infix vs. Suffix

Predicates may occur infix (in the middle of a command line) or suffix (at the end). Suffix predicates allow multiple parameters. Infix predicates, however, accept only one parameter as their parameter.

Furthermore, filter expressions (predicate form WHERE) are outside the standard Football/pianod command line parsing. The usual word boundary and quoting rules are not applicable, preventing WHERE predicates from infix use entirely.

Playlists vs. Others

Efficiency

IDs are encoded with source, type, and a unique item identifier. Items can be retrieved by ID more quickly than via other methods; a decoded ID is routed to the correct source, which in turn probably uses hash tables. This gain only applies to ID predicate form (such as ID "3ss3578329"); building an expression that uses ID (such as WHERE ID = "3ss3578329") will function but, like most predicates, locate items by exhaustive comparison. Since the ID is unique, it guarantees the correct item is manipulated, and no side-effects to similar items.

Additionally, ID predicates are validated to ensure each item exists. With other predicate forms, lack of a match is not an error; for IDs, it is an error if a corresponding item is not found. If multiple IDs were specified, none are processed.

Thus, ID predicates are the “gold standard,” and should be used by client implementations whenever possible.

Filter Mechanism

Filter expressions are used with the WHERE predicate form.

History & Thanks

I originally developed the filter in late 2005 as a replacement for the mserv filter mechanism. It was backward-compatible with the original mserv filter, with new features and a performance boost. pianod2 retains a similar syntax but includes various enhancements.

My thanks to Kimmo Suominen for documenting the original mserv filter syntax.

This document describes the pianod2 filter syntax.

Overview

Operators and Precedence

Evaluation is left to right.

Operator =~
Performs substring search operator (strings fields only).
Operator = and Operator ==
Both = and == are equivalence operators.
Operator !=
Inequivalence operator.
Operator <, >, <= and >=
Perform strings or numeric comparison appropriate to the data field.
Operator :
Not implemented yet. Perform regular expression matching.
“Quoted text”
Equivalent to SEARCH =~ “the text enclosed”. Use either single quotes (apostrophes) or double quotes.

The RHS of comparisons can be quoted. If the next non-whitespace character after the operator is a single or double quote, then the string is collected up to the close quote, which must be the same type as the open quote. The quote character may be inserted into the string by doubling it in place.

Ratings: superb, good, neutral, bad, awful, several other adjectives or a number between 0.5 and 5.0.

Comparisons/Keywords

Binary
HEARD (songs)
True if the song has ever been played. Not all sources persist this information.
RATED (songs, playlists)
True if the song or playlist has been rated by any user, logged in or not.
PLAYED
True if the song has ever been played. Equivalent to LASTPLAY > 0.
COMPILATION
True if an album is a compilation or a song is from a compilation album.
FALSE
False is always false. Useful in creating expressions that return the empty set.
String
ID = {id}
True if the ID matches. No wildcards.
TYPE = type
Match only the specified type, which is one of: ARTIST or AUTHOR, ALBUM or ALBUMNAME, TRACK or TITLE or SONG.
ALBUM {cmp} pattern (also ALBUMNAME; applies to albums, tracks)
Compare album name. False for artists or playlists.
ARTIST {cmp} pattern (also AUTHOR; albums, songs)
Compare artist name. False for playlists.
TITLE {cmp} pattern (also SONG; tracks, playlists)
Compare song/track title. False for artists, songs or playlists.
PLAYLIST {cmp} pattern
Compare playlist name. False for artists and albums.
NAME {cmp} pattern
Compare primary field. For songs, compares titles; for albums, album name; for artists, the artist name; for playlists, the playlist name.
SEARCH [ = =~ ] pattern (all)
Compare the various components to the pattern. {cmp} can be any of the comparison operators. SEARCH checks artist name, album names, track title and and playlist name, and can not be used with less than/greater than.
GENRE [ = =~ ] {genre} (tracks, playlists)
True if a song or playlist belongs to genre. No wildcards, but =~ does a substring match rather than matching genre name - so for example, you could use GENRE =~ “ROCK/POP”. When using operator =, genres may be separated by commas, slashes and plus (common on FreeDb and CDDB).
{user} {cmp} {rating} (songs, playlists)
Compare the user’s rating for a song or playlist.
{user} = RATED
True if specified user has rated the item.
Numeric
RATING {cmp} number
Compare the average rating of a song or playlist.
DURATION {cmp} number
Compare duration of song, in seconds.
LASTPLAY {cmp} number
Compare last played time, in hours.
TRACK {cmp} number
Compare track number.
YEAR {cmp} number
Compare year.
Unknown values vs. Nonexistent fields

When values are unknown, the comparison returns false. For example, year > 1955 returns one set of songs, year <= 1955 returns a second, but there is a third set of songs without any assigned year. These can be found with some finagling, such as !(year >= 1).

If a value does not exist, it is always false, even with preceding negation. For example a search for year > 1955 || year <= 1955 || !year >= 1 on an artist is false, because artists do not have years. However, a filter for year > 1955 | “Madonna” could be true, because the non sequitur portion of the expression does not preclude the rest being potentially true.