Wildcards and missing entities

[pvandyken]

Should the presence of a wildcard require that the wildcard be present? For example, if run is a wildcard, should paths without the run entity be collected (and run would just be excluded from the zip lists, etc). Or put another way, does having run as a wildcard imply a filter run=Query.ANY?

[tkkuehn]

My gut reaction: No, mainly because of the (I think) common situation where you want to support the subject and session wildcards if they're there but don't actually care whether there are sessions or not. I think this is the current wildcard behaviour and it would be good to make sure that's explicit.

Basically in my opinion we want to support each of the three following possibilities:

• The entity must not be defined (Filter Query.NONE; or implicitly, neither a wildcard nor a filter)
• The entity must be captured in a wildcard if defined but may be absent (Wildcard)
• The entity must be defined and captured in a wildcard (Filter Query.ANY).

[pvandyken]

Sounds good. This is the current behaviour, but I never thought about it until now setting up support for Query.None and Query.ANY. I wanted to make sure that this design was intentional