Expression Engine - Channel Fields Search - expressionengine

I'm fairly new to Expression Engine and I feel this is a really simple question, I just can't find a straight-forward answer from the documentation.
I have a list of restaurants and an alphabetized menu (A B C D etc...)
I want to search only he listings that start with the letter "A".
In a tradiational MySQL search that's be WHERE Title LIKE 'A%'
Any ideas?

I do not believe the Channel Entries module's search parameter allows LIKE matching.
You'll save time by grabbing the Low Alphabet module in this specific case for sure.

Expression Engine doesn't have an exact "LIKE" option but they do have something similar.
I can search a field to see if it "contains" a string but there isn't anything specifically to determine if it starts with or ends with a specific string (such as would be easily available in MySQL).
I ended up doing the "contains" search parameter and then excluded any results within the exp:channel:entries looping that didn't match my exact criteria.

Related

How can I easily get search context around search term with Typesense?

I currently use Typesense to search in an HTML database. When I search for a term, I would like to retrieve N characters before and N characters after the term found in search.
For example, I search for "query" and this is the sentence that matches:
Let's repeat the query we made earlier with a group_by parameter
I would like to easy retrieve a fixed number of letters (or words) before and after the term to show it in a presumably small area where the search results is retrieved, without breaking any words.
For this particular example, I would be showing:
..repeat the query we made earlier..
Is there a feature like this in Typesense?
I have checked Typesense's documents, without any luck.
The feature you're referring to is called snippets/highlights and it's enabled by default. You can control how many words are returned on either side of the matched text using the highlight_affix_num_tokens search parameter, documented under the table here: https://typesense.org/docs/0.23.1/api/search.html#results-parameters
highlight_affix_num_tokens
The number of tokens that should surround the highlighted text on each side. This controls the length of the snippet.

How do you construct an Azure Search query to return a wildcard search based solely on a specific field?

If I may have missed this in some other area of SO please redirect me but I don't think this is a duped question.
I am using Azure Search with an index field called Title which is searchable and filterable using a Standard Lucerne Analyzer.
When using the built-in explorer, if I want to return all Job Titles that are explicitly named Full Stack Developer I can achieve it this way:
$filter=Title eq 'Full Stack Developer'&$count=true
But if I want to retrieve all the Job Titles using a wildcard to return all records having Full Stack in the name this way:
$filter=Title eq 'Full Stack*'&$count=true
The first 20 or so records returned are spot on, but after that point I get a mix of records that have absolutely nothing in common with the Title I specified in the query. My initial assumption was that perhaps Azure was including my specified Title performing an inclusive keyword search on the text as well.
Though I found a few instances where that hypothesis seemed to prove out, so many more of the records returned invalidated that altogether.
Maybe I don't understand fully the mechanics under the hood of Azure Search and so though my query appears to be valid; my expectation of the result is way off.
So how should my query look to perform a wildcard resulting to guarantee the words specified in the search to be included in the Titles returned, if this should be possible? And what would be the correct syntax to condition the return to accommodate for OR operators to be inclusive?
Azure Cognitive Search allows you to perform wildcard searches limited to specific fields only. To do so, you will need to specify the name of the fields in which you want to perform the search in searchFields parameter.
Your search URL in this case would be something like:
https://accountname.search.windows.net/indexes/indexname/docs?api-version=2020-06-30&searchFields=Title&search=Full Stack*
From the link here:

Returning accented as well as normal result set via azure search filters

Does anyone know how to ensure we can return normal result as well as accented result set via the azure search filter. For e.g the below filter query in Azure search returns a name called unicorn when i check for record with name unicorn.
var result= searchServiceClient.Documents.SearchAsync<myDto>("*",new SearchParameters
{
SearchFields = new List<string> {"Name"},
Filter = "Name eq 'unicorn'"
});
This is all good but what i want is i want to write a filter such that it returns record named unicorn as well as record named únicorn (please note the first accented character) provided that both record exist.
This can be achieved when searching for such name via the search query using language or Standard ASCII folding search analyzer as mentioned in this link. What i am struggling to find out is how can we implement the same with azure filters?
Please let me know if anyone has got any solutions around this.
Filters are applied on the non-analyzed representation of the data, so I don’t think there’s any way to do any type of linguistic analysis on filters. One way to work around this is to manually create a field which only do lowercasing + asciifloding (no tokenization) and then search lucene queries that look like this:
"normal search query terms" AND customFilterColumn:"filtérValuèWithÄccents"
Basically the document would both need to match the search terms in any field AND also match the filter term in the “customFilterColumn”. This may not be sufficient for your needs, but at least you understand the art of the possible.
Using filters it won't work unless you specify in advance all the possibilities:
for example:
$filter=name eq 'unicorn' or name eq 'únicorn'
You'd better work with a different analyzer that will change accents to it's root form. As another possibility, you can try fuzzy search:
search=unicorn~&highlight=Name

Azure Search - regex search

I am trying to configure Azure Search to find some strings that have special characters, for example
ABC*DEF
When I look for a the full term using "ABC*DEF", it works perfectly.
The problem comes if I want to use a regex term:
When I use a partial term, like /(.*)ABC(.*)/, the result has no problem
When I use a partial term, like /(.*)DEF(.*)/, the result has no problem
But when I try to look for something like /(.*)C\*D(.*)/, the result is empty.
I am using a standard analyzer. I tried also the keyword analyzer but that way the regex search doesn't work at all.
Any suggestions?
You won't be able to create a regex expression that matches ABC*DEF using the standard analyzer.
If you run "ABC\*DEF" through the analyzer api using "standard" analyzer, you will see that ABC*DEF gets divided into 2 tokens at indexing time -> "ABC" and "DEF". Regex expression are not analyzed, however, they need to match a token that exist in the index.
Since ABC\*DEF does not exist in the index (only "ABC" and "DEF" exist), you won't be able to find it using the expression you are searching for.
Using the "keyword" analyzer will keep the whole field as a single token, so if the field "only" contained the expression ABC\*DEF, then the regex expression would work on it, however, if ABC\*DEF is part of a larger paragraph of text, then that's probably not what you want to use.
Your best bet is to create a custom analyzer that tokenizes your text in the way that preserves the special characters that are relevant to your use case.
If you're searching for special chars, why don't you discard normal chars?
[^\w]

wildcard searches on specific elements only

I am looking for a way to do wildcard search only on specific elements when executing a search:search. Specifically, I might have documents that look like the following:
<pdbe:person-envelope xmlns:pdbe="http://schemas.abbvienet.com/people-db/envelope">
<person xmlns="http://schemas.abbvienet.com/people-db/model">
<costcenter>
<code>0000601775</code>
<name>DISC-PLAT INFORM</name>
</costcenter>
<displayName>Tj Tang</displayName>
<upi>10025613</upi>
<firstName>
<preferred>TJ</preferred>
<given>Tze-John</given>
</firstName>
<lastName>
<preferred>Tang</preferred>
<given>Tang</given>
</lastName>
<title>Principal Research Scientist</title>
</person>
<pdbe:raw/>
</pdbe:person-envelope>
When searches happen, I want the search text to be automatically wildcarded, but only for certain elements like displayName, firstName, lastName, but NOT for upi or code. As I understand it, I would have certain wildcard related indexes enabled in the database, but then I would need to have a custom query parser that rewrite the query into multiple cts:element-query and cts:element-value-query statements for each element that I want to wildcard search on, OR'd with the originally parsed search query. Or I can create field constraints, and rewrite the query to use field contraints.
Is there another way to conditionally search using wildcard on some elements but not others, when the user is entering as simple search query?, i.e. partial first and last name, "TJ Tan", but no partial hits when I search "100256".
You are on the right track. Lets take an element (or maybe field) query on "TS Tan"
With cts:tokenize, you can break this up (read about cs:tokenize - it is not just a normal tokenizer).
Then I have "TS" and "Tan"
You can the do things like apply business rules on which word should be wild-carded and which not and build the appropriate cts query (probably individual word queries in an and statement - or a near query - tuning depends on your need).
Now with search phrase tokenized, you can also consider that you may find building your results relies not on a wildcard index, but on a an element word lexicon - where you do your term-expansion with word-matches and those terms are then sent to the query.
We sometimes take that further and combine the query building with xdmp:estimate and make the query less restrictive if we don't get enough results early on.
Where to put this logic?
You mention search:search, so in this case, I would suggest you package this into a custom constraint.

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