Standardising search behaviour across Nodel

[justparking]

The single search field has been very useful over the years but has room for improvement.

One issue is it only matches based on a single phrase and the results are too broad.

e.g. if you wanted to find all Philips displays in gallery 1, as things stand you can only search for either all Philips displays or everything in gallery 1, not both.

We've been running some experimental code outside of this main project to test different search behaviour. What has worked well is treating each word as a phrase and and then AND-ing all those words.

For example, for this given list:

• Gallery 1 - Display 1 (Philips)
• Gallery 1 - Display 2 (Philips)
• Gallery 1 - DSP (Biamp)
• Gallery 1 (group)
• Gallery 2 - Display 1 (Philips)
• Gallery 2 - Display 2 (Philips)
• Gallery 2 - DSP (Biamp)
• Gallery 2

Using search query gallery 1 philips does something like (written in :

  reducedName = reduce(name) -- treats as lower-case, strips punctuation incl. whitespace
  SELECT name WHERE reducedName like '%gallery%' AND reducedName like '%1%' AND reducedName like '%philips%'

What you end up is this list:

• Gallery 1 - Display 1 (Philips)
• Gallery 1 - Display 2 (Philips)

Currently there is no way to produce that shortlist.

Having tested it for a while I'm proposing we make it standard nodel behaviour across the board including:

• the main nodel browsing pages:
  • local
  • global
• activity logs filter
• binding selections

Any ideas, please feel free to discuss here.

(CC @mcartmel, @morimoriysmoon, @scroix, @dargs, @paxofsnax, @mmiller3016)

[morimoriysmoon]

A new branch added.
https://github.com/morimoriysmoon/nodel/tree/feat-standardise-search