Proposal for tradeoffs between column value calculation and search

Chandler has general columns used when we show a mixed collection of Kinds: the Who, About and When columns. There are complicated bunch of rules for what should appear in these columns. For example, to calculate the Who column value for an email:

• If the email is from somebody else, the sender or from field appears in the Who column
• If the email is from me, the recipient appears in the Who column
• If the email hasn't been sent yet...
• If the email was shared from somebody else ("me" is neither the sender or receiver)...

We don't know yet what all these rules are, but attribute indirection is pretty complicated to make this work. Sometimes it just seems to need code.

However, when you use code, how does search work? You can't search on the "who" field because it's not stored, it's calculated.

My proposal to solve this is to allow users to search on "People fields" and that will include all the relevant fields depending on Kind, regardless of which one is displayed in the Who column. Maybe users can even be more specific and search on the "Sender" or "recipient" if they know exactly what they're doing. This functionality would already provide much more than Mail.app currently does and it allows us to simplify how we calculate the value that happens to show up in the Who column.

This proposal is for the Kibble timeframe; it's not really a problem if we decide to do something more complicated later (the problem for this issue is trying to do something too complicated now).

Counterproposals welcome...