The Catalist
It was a globe with a thousand facets; it shone like silver in the firelight, like water in the sun, like snow under the stars, like rain upon the Moon!
2026-04-17, by DrFriendless featurestechnology
OK, the Catalist is no Arkenstone, but it was dug from deep in the code mines at great expense (no balrogs yet, though). When I blogged about 3 weeks ago that I was going to do it next I wasn’t really clear what it was going to look like or how it would work. So some of the three weeks was spent figuring that out, and then the remainder of the three weeks was spent cleaning up the mess I made before I knew where I was going.
The Catalist is a feature for logged-in users. It appears in the Users menu.
The purpose of the Catalist is to let you find games for any given situation. In particular it works with the Tagalogue to meld your user-defined tags with other metadata about games. Let’s work through an example.
I’ve been using the Tagalogue to mark games with tags to suggest who I might play them with. I’ve recently started attending a new game group called “Ticket to Ryde” (which is of course held at Ryde). I love my other game group but my dog is allowed to come to Ticket to Ryde, and going anywhere basically requires his permission.
Anyway, I am getting to know those people and wondering what games to take along of the 350 or so that I have (the pre-eminent factor here is whether I remember the rules well enough to teach). Whenever I think “oh I should take that”, I mark it with the tag “TtRyde”. So the Tagalogue has this sort of data:
That’s a half-decent classification system, but the Tagalogue only facilitates adding and removing tags. It’s not a query mechanism - that’s what the Catalist is for.
So I go to the Catalist and I ask it to “tell me all the games I’ve got that I thought I might want to take to Ticket to Ryde”. And using the magic of selectors it can find the results.
But before we get to the results, let’s look at what’s in the Catalist.
- the Chooser - this is where you can choose the basic selectors
- the Store - this is where you can store selectors you’ve previously created
- the Composer - this is where the selector you’re specifying gets built up.
I’m not going to put a full explanation of the Catalist in ths blog post as it will get its own Doco page (The entry page for the Doco is in the menu under Blog). I just invented the Doco section this morning as I need a more organised and less chit-chatty place to describe features, so I’ve only had time to write the Selectors page. I think if you understand selectors the Catalist will make sense.
So, back to the results. Maybe I just found that my nieces Ankita and Antara are coming to play games as well. They are happy to play what the other is playing, so I can take games that either of them knows and they will teach the other. Furthermore, they are very helpful with looking after the dog in case he suddenly has to go for a walk.
The Catalist provides a rudimentary query facility on the same page, mostly so you can test that the selector is working like you think it should, or maybe so you can get quick answers. If you want better results you can open the results in a new window - that’s called the Query page and its features are briefly mentioned in the selectors doco.
Well, this is the first cut of the Catalist. More features, and documentation, will be added over time. In the meantime I’d be happy to hear any user feedback.
