I have an SDO supplying data to a read-only browser. The SDO query joins several tables and has calculated fields as well as natural data fields.
The users now want a search facility so the browser will only show rows where the search word appears in ANY of the text fields.
For example they want to see rows where
customer.name matches "*bob*" OR
customer.address1 matches "*bob*" OR
product.description matches "*bob*" OR
calc_field_1 matches "*bob*" OR
calc_field_2 matches "*bob*" OR ...
Ideally the answer will filter the SDO output as it is created - but I am also happy to filter the data on the way to the smartbrowser or in the smartbrowser.
The business problem you're trying to solve in fraught with performance issues if you implement it as written. I'd suggest
adding another character column to the table or db,
putting all the words from the other columns in it,
applying a word-index to the new column,
doing a search on that column, and then linking back to the source tables.
It'll be much faster and easier to use.
I used a very simple solution in the end. Users can enter a string they are looking for. If the string is in a cell in the browser then the cell is highlighted in yellow.
Before this the users had to scroll up and down trying to spot the cells of interest in hundreds of rows. We did not have the time or budget for anything fancier.
The important bit of code in the smartbrowser is like this...
on row-display of br_table in frame f-main
do:
if rowObject.field1 matches "*BOB*" then
rowObject.field1:BGCOLOR in browse br_table = 14.
if rowObject.field2 matches "*BOB*" then
rowObject.field2:BGCOLOR in browse br_table = 14.
if rowObject.field3 matches "*BOB*" then
rowObject.field3:BGCOLOR in browse br_table = 14.
... etc ...
it's not hard-coded to only look for Bob - but you should get the idea.
Related
I've loaded a dataset into an Algolia search index. Each item in the index is a shop with a catchment area (the catchment area is just an array of UK Postcodes that a store covers). For example:
['DS4 6','DS4 7', 'DS5 8, 'DS6 9' ... ]
The search feature is working to a point. If people search for "DS4" then Algolia returns several stores, but most people are typing their full post code (for example DS4 8XX) and this isn't returning anything even though "DS4" is indexed several times.
Is there a configuration in Algolia to search for the first part of a word, even when a person has 'typed past it'?
To clarify this a bit further. I could store every single individual postcode in a catchment area but there are millions and millions of them. A full UK postcode would be "DS4 7EN", so there are two more characters on the end representing a street in the UK. I've got the first part of a postcode: eg "DS4 7" because it seems excessive to store everything when I only really care about the wider area, ie: DS4, DS5, CV43, AB2 (and so on).
I could also probably use a places api and geocode the address. But I already have this catchment area postcode data, so it seems a shame not to use it if I can.
Algolia, like most search engines supports prefix search in order to allow search-as-you-type results, which is leveraged with InstantSearch libraries, where results are updated live as the user types. Without prefix search, you would have to wait for the user to enter an entire word before displaying any meaningful result.
In your case, since the catchment areas are indexed, e.g., DS4 6, when a user types DS4 6XX, no records will match the query since the query acts as a filter on the records based on their searchable attributes.
That said, I see two possible workaround that you can implement.
The first solution is to use the removeWordsIfNoResults index setting and set it to "Last Word". This will remove the last word of the query if there are no results. For instance, with the query DS4 6XX it will remove 6XX to just keep DS4 and retrieve the items that match this query. Note that this solution relies on the fact that DS4 6XX has two words (separated by a space) and it won't work with DS46XX.
The second solution is to change the structure of the records to add the full postcode in each item of the index. Since these are shops, I believe that it should be possible. This way your users will be able to search for both the full postcode DS4 6XX and the catchment areas DS4 6. Unless I misunderstood your problem, I don't see the need to store the full list of postcodes associated to a catchment area.
I have a table in a word document that has three colums and all fields are mailmerge fields from an external IT system.
There are three columns displaying the fields:
Charge Description
Charge Value (£)
Eiligible? (yes/no)
I am trying to create a field that adds up all eligibale charges so that only charge values that show a "yes" in the eligigble field are included. Does anyone know if this is possible? I have tried creating a formula but can't get it to work. Also, I would assume at some point an if statment is required so that it only includes the eligible charge.
Has anyone done anything similar before and if so, would they mind sharing how it was achieved?
Many thanks
You can do some things with expression fields (created in Word with CTRL-F9). This will look like {} and you can insert the expression. eg {{MERGFIELD charge} + {MERGEFIELD charge2}}. Since however you want to check multiple values and then create an expression, its probably easier to use a macro. The macro would contain your logic, then set the fields in the document accordingly.
Here are two external links since I can't reproduce a useful amount the content here because it's a verbose answer to a potentially deep question:
Expression Fields
Merge fields
I hope that helps.
Is it possible, in SQL Server 2008, using the full text index syntax, to run a query such as this one?
SELECT *
FROM TABLE_TO_SEARCH S,
TABLE_WITH_STRINGS_TO_SEARCH SS
WHERE
CONTAINS(S.WHOLE_NAME,SS.FIRST_NAME)
OR CONTAINS(S.WHOLE_NAME,SS.LAST_NAME)
I need to search for the FIRST_NAME in table TABLE_TO_SEARCH, column WHOLE_NAME that has an full text index on it. It doesn't seem to be a valid query though... Is there any workaround to it by using the full text index search?
LATER EDIT:
Here is the business case: each night I am downloading from several websites information about "blacklisted" individuals and insert it into a table in this format: WholeName, LastName, FirstName, MiddleName. But the data is chaotic as WholeName does not necessarily contain either the last, first or middle name or the WholeName is null while the other 3 fields have values, or every of these 4 fields is null and so on. Also, the data may repeat itself as one blacklisted individual may come from 2+ of these websites. What I need to do is to compare this data, as chaotic as it is, against our customer data based on our customer's First and Last name and give it a matching score (rank) against the files we download from these websites.
First I tried with charindex or like operators but I couldn't create a scoring algorithm based on this and also it took 6 hours to compare just our customer's first and last name with only the WholeName column from the TABLE_TO_SEARCH table. I thought that perhaps implementing the full_text index it would get easier and faster but ... apparently I was wrong.
Has anyone dealt with a task like this? And if so, what was the best approach?
After skimming http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms187787.aspx and http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms142571.aspx I don't think it is possible to do your search in this way. Not only that, but it seems this type of index wouldn't work well with names anyway.
If you care about checking one name then all you have to do is set those values to variables. This method would allow you to use the full-text index.
Otherwise, I would suggest splitting the WHOLE_NAME column (if there is a space or unique character between the first and last name) and comparing each part to those other columns. If you are working with a huge data set, you may want to experiment with doing this at a temp table level and creating an index.
Good luck!
i have a kinda weird problem with haystack/elasticsearch trying to find tv episodes stored in my database based on a string like this: 's04e07' which means season 4 episode 7 and is a kind of standard format, but the search index has its problems with that.
Trying a few different things it looks like numbers are not indexed in EdgeNgramFields.
In a CharField i can only find exact word matches like '2013' if contained in the titel, but i have no luck finding 's04e07'.
How do i get my results out of the index?
How could i possibly change the hardcoded default mapping in haystack to index my stuff correctly?
I actually wrote about haystack a few days ago, I would suggest reading that one first:
Django Haystack Distinct Value for Field
It's not directly on point, but my advice here is the same. Stop using haystack.
Haystack comes with an outofthebox edgengram and ngram analyzers, which is cool, except these analyzers don't work in nearly all use cases.
They will especially not work in yours because you are mixing numbers and chars.
But my first question is, why can't you index the data like this:
"season":1
"episode":1
And then at search time break down the users search into the above format?
If that isn't possible, you can still PUT a mapping manually without letting haystack do it for you (which I recommend highly anyway because it's mappings are not correct). It's pretty easy to do with elasticutils.
Keep in mind, I don't think edgengram is exactly what you want here in any event. because it only grams from the edge and is most useful for autocompletes, for example if someone is typing s04e and you want to display a list of possible matches.
So, this depends on how users will query the data. Will it always be the above string whole, or parts of the string, or will they sometimes search for e07 and you want to show all seasons with episode 7's?
The last possibility here is to just index it as normal (haystack will choose snowball) and use prefix queries / regex queries to get what you want.
I've got input that is analogous to tags, where there are a couple of strings per record, and they should be thought of as keywords, not to be tokenized or broken up or analyzed in any particular way. I want it to show up in faceting "as-is", including spaces, slashes, dashes and ampersands.
I don't think I need multi_field here. There is one input value per record "keyPhrases" but the input value is a simple json array of strings.
I want elasticsearch to insert into the facets each of the values, and tag the record with all of the phrases.
Usually there are only one or two or three phrases per record, but there could be more. The set of keyPhrases is fairly small, like 30 or at most like 50. They could be thought of as "categories".
The faceting keeps breaking up the input strings and using lowercasing, even though I'm trying to specify not_analyzed, keyword tokenizer, keyword analyzer, and trying things like that.
I have other fields that keep their spacing and capitalization as I desire in the facets returned, however those fields are not_analyzed and are also store: true, but are also just exactly 1 string input per record, as opposed to many per record.
I could just take the top 1 keyPhrase per record and flatten it, but ideally all the tags would work and be available as facets.
Any ideas on how to do this?
Well, this is embarrassing.
My strict mapping wasn't actually committed to the server at the time I was trying this.
(I was dropping the index and creating the index again with each new mapping, and hadn't realized it, and this was not the final mapping, so it was getting loaded and then dropped.)