Substring search without wildcard

Is there any way to tailor a search filter so that a wildcard isn’‘t needed? I was demoing this, and it’'s not intuitive for most users to have to enter a “*” potentially before and after a portion of a last name for their search to work correctly.

Hi Brian,

I’‘ve add this request to my search plugin todo list. Out of curiosity, are you using a client that doesn’'t show the instructions which read, “Wildcard (*) characters are allowed as part of the query”? If those instructions are shown but are unclear, do you have any suggestions on how to make them easier to understand?

Thanks,

Ryan

Heh. Yes - I’‘m using Spark which does show those instructions. But I also know that some users don’‘t read instructions especially when they’‘re trying to accomplish a task quickly. In addition, we’‘re an almost 100% Windows shop (although I’'m a UNIX admin) and most Windows applications (Outlook included) do not require wildcards to do a search.

Thanks!

Brian

Hi Brian,

I’‘m certainly one of those users that don’'t always see/read those types of instructions.

The original reason for not appending a wildcard to front and back of each search was to help keep the number of the search results to something reasonable. For instance, if the wildcards were automatically included and a user only enters an “a” the number of matches could be quite large. Anyway, it seems like when the wildcard feature is added it would also be a good time to add the ability to enforce a minimum search length and set the number of results that are returned.

Cheers,

Ryan

Excellent! Thanks!

-b

Hi,

I don’'t like the idea that * or ? are used as wildcards for search as one may search for users with * or ? in the JID like “**@jivesoftware.com”. And as one may want to search for "

**/*@example.com" it’'s not really possible to use escape characters.

LG