Re: REST API: Sorting, wish-list

On Wed, Aug 28, 2019 at 09:14:11PM -0400, John P. Rouillard wrote:
> >Let me know what you think about the new syntax.
> 
> := looks like assignment to me, but I don't have a better alternative,
> so it works for me. I suspect I would not use ~= and just go with the
> = format.
Fine. The ~ looks too much like substring-search to me. So I've
implemented ~= as an alias for simple '='. So at some point we may want
to deprecate '=' for string search.

> Given the discussion about %SYS searching on the user's list, would
> extending it to a third form like *= to indicate search everything
> including non-word character strings be a reasonable idea?

The problem on the user list was searching '%SYS' in the fulltext
indexer. The indexer strips all non-alphanum chars afaik. So this will
never work with a new syntay unless the indexer is also changed.

For text searching, finding '%SYS' with a substring search should
already work (% is also used in SQL for the LIKE/ILIKE operators but
should be properly escaped, at least there is a regression test for
exactly this use-case). So I don't think we need another syntax.

> I think I remeber mentioning in an email that full text search over
> rest would be useful. I may have suggested @search=word as the
> mechanism.

Yes. This would involve a two-step process, first searching fulltext via
the indexer and the plugging the returned IDs into the usual filter call
as the first parameter.

> Then to search for %SYS, something like @search*=%SYS could be used.
> Maybe it couldbe implemented with a full text search for SYS then
> taking all the resulting messages and looking for %SYS. As any message
> that doesn't include SYS isn't going to include %SYS.

I think that fulltext searching such a short string would return a lot
of results. Better to plug the search directly into a String search --
if you know in which field it should be found. If it's in a message
contents, fulltext-search is the only option.

Also a nice day to you!
Ralf
-- 
Dr. Ralf Schlatterbeck                  Tel:   +43/2243/26465-16
Open Source Consulting                  www:   http://www.runtux.com
Reichergasse 131, A-3411 Weidling       email: [email protected]