636571 - Enhanced text search

Status: VERIFIED FIXED

(Mozilla QA :: Case Conductor-Platform, enhancement, P2)

Description

[Carl Meyer (:carljm)]

As far as I'm aware, the current search
API only supports exact matches on text fields. For a usable search box
(to e.g. search test cycles/runs/suites by name), it should be able to
do at the very least partial matches. 

Ideally a real full-text search would also do stemming and ranking of results by relevance, but that may not be necessary here.

Comment 1

[Vadim]

All strings are already using LIKE operator with ending wild card '%', so it would return anything starting from the typed string.

Comment 2

[Carl Meyer (:carljm)]

(In reply to comment #1)
> All strings are already using LIKE operator with ending wild card '%', so it
> would return anything starting from the typed string.

If it isn't customizable (e.g. by using beginning-of-string/end-of-string markers in the query), then the default should use % on both ends of the string. That's more likely to match people's expectations when doing a text search.

Comment 3

[Vadim]

(In reply to comment #2)
> (In reply to comment #1)
> > All strings are already using LIKE operator with ending wild card '%', so it
> > would return anything starting from the typed string.
> 
> If it isn't customizable (e.g. by using beginning-of-string/end-of-string
> markers in the query), then the default should use % on both ends of the
> string. That's more likely to match people's expectations when doing a text
> search.

who says? I worked in tons of apps where it was the default behavior. You don't won't to put starting wild card all the time, because it would disable use of indexes defined for searchable columns... I'm OK with removing wild cards completely and let users type them any way they want based on their level of experience...

Comment 4

[Carl Meyer (:carljm)]

(In reply to comment #3)
> who says? I worked in tons of apps where it was the default behavior. You don't
> won't to put starting wild card all the time, because it would disable use of
> indexes defined for searchable columns... I'm OK with removing wild cards
> completely and let users type them any way they want based on their level of
> experience...

Sure, that approach would be good, I think (allow users to specify wildcards as desired).

Comment 5

[Vadim]

Removed trailing wild card from default string handler. 
Now UI is responsible to provide wild cards based on user's request.