[Koha-devel] [Bug 363] Searching on contains works only with full names.

[paul POULAIN]

Anthony W Youngman wrote:

>Spoken like a true computer geek ...
>
True, but we are on koha-devel, and bugzilla :-) So it's supposed to be 
only for geek. (or future geeks !)

>I'm sorry, but just because it's hard on the computer doesn't mean that
>someone isn't going to want to do it.
>
I don't say it's hard on the computer. I say performance would be really 
poor... really.

>Admittedly, our db isn't that big, but "partial" means partial, it does
>not mean "starts with".
>
Yes, but on a 200 000 biblio DB...

>Two suggestions - either add it as an option, warning that it will need
>to scan the entire index and hence is likely to be slow, or create an
>index that progressively strips leading characters. To speed a brute
>force search up, you could possibly create a file that consists solely
>of the words, so you can search that file for matches, and then look up
>the match in the index itself. Actually - a third option too - create a
>"flipped word" index so you can do an "ends with" search.
>
the word index already exists. So you can search very fast any biblio 
having title containing "tower", thus findind 'the two towers'.
The question was to find the two towers when entering only "tow". That's 
possible too, but i'm not sure it's an interesting feature.

What is impossible is to find "the two towers" when searching "owe".
And i think it's a good feature ! when you enter owe, you search "owe", 
not "tower".

-- 
Paul POULAIN
Consultant indépendant en logiciels libres
responsable francophone de koha (SIGB libre http://www.koha-fr.org)