Search

Search by Abstract

The abstract of a document summarizes information about a document, e.g, its title, author and tags. Thus a search by abstract with query "einstein" might match "einstein" in the title, in the author field, or in a document tag.

Queries for documents using jxxcarlson/elm-text-search look like the following:

• "foo": retrieve documents whose abstract digest contains "foo"

• "foo bar": retrieve documents whose abstract digest contains "foo" and "bar"

• "foo -bar": retrieve documents whose abstract digest contains "foo" but not "bar"

• "foo | bar": retrieve documents whose abstract digest contains "foo" or "bar"

• "'foo bar'": Note the single quotes! — retrieve documents whose abstract digest contains the phrase "foo bar". This search excludes documents containing "bar foo", "foo baz bar", etc.

To be technical, any query in disjunctive normal form is is accepted.

In addition, a query can contain the fragment ":r", which signifies a random sample (max 20) of the documents which match the search query. Thus the query "atom:r" returns a random sample of documents which match "atom", while the query ":r" returns a random sample of documents matching the ambient conditions, e.g., begin public or belong to the current user. For more complex queries, the fragment ":r" can appear by itself.

Document Abstracts

A document abstract has type

type alias Abstract =
    { title : String
    , author : String
    , abstract : String
    , tags : String
    , digest : String }

The digest is computed by

toString : Abstract -> String
toString a =
    [ a.title, a.author, a.tags ] |> String.join "; "

Abstracts are held in the field abstractDict : Dict DocId Abstract of the backend model. This dictionary is updated every Config.backendTickSeconds by the update function of the backend model:

Tick newTime ->
    -- Do regular tasks
    ( { model | currentTime = newTime }
        |> updateAbstracts
        |> Backend.Update.updateDocumentTags
    , Command.none
    )

Initiating a Search by Abstract

User document searches are initiated by the Search clause of Frontend.update. This clause invokes Frontend.Search.search which send a message of type

SearchForDocuments DocumentHandling SearchMode QueryString

to the back end, where QueryString is an alias for String and where

type SearchMode
    = UserSearch Username
    | PublicSearch

This message is handled by

-- module Backend.Search
forDocuments : 
  BackendModel 
  -> ClientId 
  -> DocumentHandling 
  -> SearchMode
  -> Types.QueryString 
  -> ( BackendModel, Command BackendOnly ToFrontend backendMsg )

All searches that can be routed through this function should be.

Search by Tag

((Under Construction))