I've been looking at this feature request:

• When you do a search, could the search results table have a sentence at the top which states what the search was? Ie., Search results for Date > 1790 and Document type = DCM and Fausses nouvelles (custom field) = true.

There are two specific problems with it: first of all, there's ALREADY a complete record of the search you made, on the page itself, sitting in the form that you completed. When JW made this request, she didn't realize that, because the form collapses out of the way to leave you with more space on the page for the search results, but one click reveals it again, in full detail. Therefore I think it's basically redundant. The second issue is that creating a prose view of the search (as opposed to the tabular form you fill out) would be complex and therefore time consuming, because much of the information that a human would need to understand it is not actually part of the search that goes to the db. Integer id fields are what the db searches for, and without the human-readable labels that go along with them (and which come from another table), they'd be meaningless. It would be possible to write JavaScript to parse the search form and construct something human-readable by connecting each field with its associated labels and each option with its string value, but in order for this to be reliable, it would require a rewrite of the search form, to supply predictable ids to all of the labels. All in all, this would take many hours.

My conclusion, after looking at this in detail, is that it would be redundant, divert a lot of my time from other more useful features, and would ultimately slow down the responsiveness of the search page.

There is an alternative that might be more effective, though. If, instead of hiding the entire search form when the search is submitted to the server, only those fields which are not part of the search were hidden, there would be a more compact, but still very human-readable, view of the search. This does make sense, although it might be a little confusing to see most, but not all, of the search fields disappear. The hide/show mechanism would have to be more explicit and intuitive than the current cryptic triangle on the search legend.