Text entry searches

[gracemyz]

Signs often include text entries such as "Module Notes" fields, "Other" fields in the Movement and Location modules, and several fields in the Sign Level Info module, including gloss / lemma / signer / coder. We should think of a good way to handle text boxes in the search function. For example, we could implement regular expression matching or fuzzy string matching.

[gracemyz]

We discussed text searching in the context of the sign level info search target. Main ideas:

Mini search builder

Each text entry (gloss, lemma, id-gloss, source, signer, coder, and notes) could include a mini search builder that allows the user to specify:

• target equals / does not equal string
• target contains / does not contain string
• target starts/ends with string?

For example, a search for ID-gloss could specify: ID-gloss starts with 'B' and does not include 'Bhand' and does not include '5hand'.

These mini search builders allow users to specify minimal / exact matching per text entry, rather than relying on the global minimal / exact search parameter (which applies to the entire search and could span multiple targets). By default, each text entry's search builder will specify any sequence of characters (i.e. target equals *).

We could do something similar for other text entry searches outside the sign level info target.

Gloss

Gloss is special because a sign can have multiple glosses. We talked about including multiple mini search builders to search for signs with multiple glosses. For example, a user could do the following search: sign has a gloss that contains "HAPPEN" and a different gloss that contains "OUTCOME".

Gloss is one area where we might want the global minimal / exact search param to apply:

• If the search is exact, then the example above should probably return signs with EXACTLY two matching glosses.
• If the search is minimal, then it should also returns signs with more than two glosses, as long as there are two that match.