Searching for multiple values in a parameter

[Fintan Donaghy]

Hi all,

In Athena you can search for multiple values of a TicketProp and return all tickets that have one of the values. this is simple for numbers etc..

 

name=in(1,2,3)

name=in( 1 , 2 , 3 )

 

This will return all tickets with name set to 1, 2 or 3

 

But for Strings there is a little bit of ambiguity

 

1. name=in(Tom,Dick,Harry)

2. name=in( Tom , Dick , Harry)

3. name=in("Tom","Dick","Harry")

4. name=in( " Tom ", " Dick ", " Harry")

5. name=in("Tom,Dick","Harry")

 

note the use of quotes and spaces? Should all of these find Tom, Dick and Harry? I believe only number 3 should find the three names. Any opinions?

 

Should we introduce strict checking that ensures that values are valid for the TicketProp?

 

 

 

[Joe Winter]

I wouldn't necessarily recommend option 4 be considered valid (we're not searching for text within a document), but it should give some pause that I might do a search for someone listed in the database as Jon, not Jonathan.

I guess it also depends on your thoughts of how intelligent the search engine should act when searching for names. Should a search for Joe also return results containing people listed as Joseph?

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[Micah L. Frost]

Is there any harm in trimming the whitespace on the front and back of the search terms? 5 would still be considered a valid query, but wouldn't give the expected results. I think we should require that strings be quoted, but do our best to be smart about whitespace.

As for the Joe vs Joseph question: that seems like an entirely different ball-game. Maybe down the road, we can look at something like Soundex?

Micah

[Gary Moore]

If strings must be quoted, must all values? Should we be lenient on the quotes meaning that we accept queries with and without quotes? I feel like that's how GET query strings work now.

Trimming whitespace at front and back, don't care either way. Let's go with "Yes, trim it."

[Fintan Donaghy]

So to summarize querys 1 to 4 are valid and would find Tom, Dick and Harry
Query 5 would do a valid search but in the absence of a name called
'Tom,Dick' it would just return Harry.

I think a LIKE query would go a bit towards solving the issue of the Jon,
Jonathon issue but as Micah suggested finding Joseph from Joe might be
something for a future search.

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From: "Gary Moore" <gary....@fracturedatlas.org>
Sent: Tuesday, October 19, 2010 4:52 PM
To: <athena-t...@googlegroups.com>