Planning issue for advanced search UI

[jywarren]

This needs to be broken up into several sub-issues, some of which could be first-timers-only candidates:

https://publiclab.org/search/dynamic is a new search system based on the RESTful API, but it has some rough edges.

• some items appear more than once (need a uniqueness parameter somewhere?)
• limiting # of results and paginating with .paginate() as is done on many other parts of the site (will improve speed)
• shortening descriptions shown if paragraphs are too long
• possibly displaying author and how recently a piece of content was updated
• advertise dynamic search as a beta service at /search

and more?

[Pk13055]

Have you reached some stand on which issues are to be tackled first? I could get a headstart if you've decided upon something

[jywarren]

I think a number of them could be broken out, but need hints to where they appear in lines of code.

The .paginate() one is one which is probably in this controller -- but the dynamic search page action is empty:

https://github.com/publiclab/plots2/blob/master/app/controllers/searches_controller.rb#L32

So I think it makes calls via JavaScript to other actions, but am not sure which. That needs some exploration (or input from @david-days?) and we could leave some helpful comments in that controller to describe what the actions do.

I'm also not sure -- can we run .paginate() (a feature of will_paginate_rails gem) on these search records?

As to the too-long descriptions, i think thatd be in javascript in this page of code, but am also not sure:

https://github.com/publiclab/plots2/blob/master/app/assets/javascripts/dynamic_search.js#L155

For either of these, we could write tests (and examine existing ones) to confirm this, starting with this page and moving on to JavaScript testing in Jasmine:

https://github.com/publiclab/plots2/blob/master/test/functional/restful_search_test.rb

There is a simple unit test for search result documents here, and perhaps we could test out the pagination by adding a new test there, once we get more info on it:

https://github.com/publiclab/plots2/blob/master/test/unit/doc_result_test.rb

So, plenty of starting places and investigating and adding comments is actually a good first step.

[ebarry]

I'm wondering, with the recent updates, what of this issue is still current generally as "next steps for search"?

Also, is there a way to use Google search inside our site, or use something from the information sciences? Perhaps we don't have to write each of these features? Wondering.

[jywarren]

Hi, this is for dynamic search, not search overall -- see leading link above. All of these are still up for grabs, as dynamic search may eventually replace standard search (i.e. http://publiclab.org/search/wind)