824732 - autocomplete doesn't complete some addresses (does not find non-leading substrings)

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 558931

(Thunderbird :: Untriaged, defect)

Description

[Matthew Woehlke]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/534.34 (KHTML, like Gecko) konqueror/4.9.4 Safari/534.34

Steps to reproduce:

1. Add an address book entry with display name 'MyCompany System Administrators', address '[e-mail]'.
2. Start composing a new mail
3. In 'To:' field, type 'sys'.


Actual results:

Nothing.


Expected results:

Autocomplete should show completion to 'MyCompany System Administrators'.

Comment 1

[Matthew Woehlke]

Originally noticed this with my company's actual sysadmin address (which is of the same form as above), but canreproduce with the actual, exact address entry as specified above.

Other addresses complete from non-leading substrings. Looking closer, I'm wondering if completion is only for leading-match of display names, or word-match of addresses, where '.' separates words but '-' does not?

Comment 2

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

(In reply to Matthew Woehlke from comment #1)
> Originally noticed this with my company's actual sysadmin address (which is
> of the same form as above), but canreproduce with the actual, exact address
> entry as specified above.
> 
> Other addresses complete from non-leading substrings. Looking closer, I'm
> wondering if completion is only for leading-match of display names,

Matthew, that's quite right, when looking closer, you'll find that TB is *not* matching anything from the *middle* of any AB field, but only things from the *beginning* of fields like first name, last name, display name etc. So depending on how these are set for your contacts, you might be fooled into thinking that substring searches work, but really they don't. Which is bug 558931, included in our current much-wanted list of papercut bugs. Please vote for that bug using bmo's vote feature.

> or word-match of addresses, where '.' separates words but '-' does not?

No, it's not all that sophisticated, but hey, with TB, you never know ;)

Thanks.