290201 - Inconsistent display of search results

Status: RESOLVED EXPIRED

(Thunderbird :: Address Book, defect)

Description

[bugzilla]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.6) Gecko/20050317 Firefox/0.9
Build Identifier: Thunderbird 1.0.2 (20050317)

When searching a large LDAP directory from the Address Book with a query that
may return a lot of results, or that runs against a slow LDAP server, subsequent
queries are sometime treated as "search within the existing set of results"
instead of new queries.  This leads to erroneously reporting "No results found"
when in fact the desired entries do exist in the directory.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. From the Address Book, search a large LDAP directory such as a college or
university directory using a query that will return a lot of results, like
"smith" or "jones".
2. Note a result that comes up near the end of the search.
3. Blank the search box and repeat the previous query, but this time before the
result you previously noted appears, add in the additional data to make the one
entry you noted come up -- for example go back to the beginning of the query box
and enter "argyle " in front of jones if the late-appearing entry were for
Argyle Jones.
4. You'll now get a blank results window, because (apparently) instead of doing
a new query for "argyle jones", the LDAP interface did a query within the
existing results for "argyle jones".  Since that entry hadn't appeared yet, it's
not displayed and the status message makes it appear that the entry doesn't
exist in the LDAP directory at all.
Actual Results:  
No results displayed, with a "No results found" status message.

Expected Results:  
The relevant entry should have been displayed.

Searching within existing results is a useful thing to be able to do, especially
with queries that return a lot of results; however, given the simple nature of
the interface, the default behavior probably should be to start a new query any
time the query string changes unless an explicit selection is given to the user
to "search within these results".

Comment 1

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

This is an automated message, with ID "auto-resolve01".

This bug has had no comments for a long time. Statistically, we have found that
bug reports that have not been confirmed by a second user after three months are
highly unlikely to be the source of a fix to the code.

While your input is very important to us, our resources are limited and so we
are asking for your help in focussing our efforts. If you can still reproduce
this problem in the latest version of the product (see below for how to obtain a
copy) or, for feature requests, if it's not present in the latest version and
you still believe we should implement it, please visit the URL of this bug
(given at the top of this mail) and add a comment to that effect, giving more
reproduction information if you have it.

If it is not a problem any longer, you need take no action. If this bug is not
changed in any way in the next two weeks, it will be automatically resolved.
Thank you for your help in this matter.

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Comment 2

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

This bug has been automatically resolved after a period of inactivity (see above
comment). If anyone thinks this is incorrect, they should feel free to reopen it.