Confusing Searching?

Need help
1

Hi, so I have made my app with a search functionality, I will quickly run over the workflows then explain my problem/query.

  • User enters query to an input.
  • User presses search button
  • User is taken to results page, where in the URL is displayed their query as a parameter eg; 1.com/results?query=John%20Doe
  • RG then does Search for Nominal where Any Field contains the query (gets from URL)

Here I have a few problems…

  1. I only have a Forename and Surname field, so if a user searches for a full name it won’t display any user… yes, I can fix this by making a Full Name field but it goes against the principles of my web app.
  2. Due to the way getting data from URL works if I want to search by DOB for the nominal so I enter that DOB to the input, I won’t get any return as I get the data as a text and DOB is set to Date.

The list goes on obviously as if I have Data Field as a Number I won’t be able to search for a nominal by whatever field is a number etc…

How can I fix this? Or how can else can I do this search functionality?

FYI: Searching is done on the page PNC, then results will show on pnc_results. I have not set up searching on any other pages except as defined here.

2

Anybody able to help, really really confused and it’s really important to get sorted.

3

Hi @cliffwoodjames …

What I would do is:

  1. After my User Sign in, I would store his name + last name in a field called “full name”. This will make your search much much easier. The user don’t need to see it. The “full name” field will be filled as a backend process. And everytime he updates his name/last name, I would do the same (rewrite the “full name”). It is very very simple to do it. And you will make your search much easier.

  2. For the DOB it depends. What kind of search are you pretanding to do? The exact DOB? With day, month and year? Or just the day/month? Can you provide more details about it?

4

Sure, for point 1 remember I am not searching for an actual user but a “Nominal” think of it as a character.

For DOB, anything so ideally to start with a full one but would be useful if I can make it so I can search for “John Doe 10/11/2020” and it will show results like that. If that’s not possible I will make an advanced search feature down the line where I can search for different values.

5

Store the DOB as text is not a solution? If you will pass it as a parameter, I think this is the easier and fastest way.

After Sign in, store the DOB as text “dd/mm/yyyy” in your database and use it in your searches.

This is not a solution??

6

And the provided solution will not work for this case??

7

Yes but will the date/time picker still work the same?

8

Also is there a way I can account for partial names or typos like if I type Jo Doe it will still show close matches but with the most probable first…

eg;

  1. Jo Doe
  2. Joe Doe
  3. John Doe
9

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