Support lookup in multiple fields per collection

[dandv]

Sample use case: search among company names and stock symbols, a la Google Finance.

[mizzao]

Why can't you just do this with different tokens? Are you saying you want to use the same token to search in different fields (and possibly in different collections?)

[dandv]

I want to search for the input string in two fields of the same collection, the Name and the Symbol of a company. I don't want to use a token at all actually (see issue #4) but for now I'll settle for ' '.

[mizzao]

The selector field can now be used in a rule to generate a custom selector for the autocomplete search selector. Does this sufficiently allow what you want to do?

[kfollmer]

So currently I am trying to get the following effect. In my autocomplete I want to drill down based on either the profile.display_name or profile.login.When a user wants to complete the autocomplete, I would like for the autocomplete to complete to the profile.login

The only thing I have working, which is the simple part of this setup is that the template shows the profile.display_name.

This is what I have tried so far and will continue to work on this, but I could use some help.

Template.autocomplete.settings = () ->
    return {
        position: "top",
        limit: 10,
        rules: [
            token: '@',
            collection: Meteor.users,
            field: "profile.display_name",
            template: Template.getUsers,
            selector: (match) ->
                return Meteor.users.find({$or: [{'profile.display_name': match}, {'profile.login': match}]})
        ]

}

[mizzao]

@kfollmer instead of returning a cursor for selector, just use the { $or: ... } part. You may also want to do something like regex = new RegExp(match, "i") and pass that in to the selector, if you want to do partial matches and not be case-sensitive either.

[kfollmer]

@mizzao Do you mean setting up something like this for the field?

field: {$or: {'profile.display_name'}, {'profile.login'}}

Im not quite sure where to use the { $or: ... } and how to use it properly

[mizzao]

No, I think you should just do

selector: (match) ->
  regex = new RegExp(match, 'i')
  return {$or: [{'profile.display_name': regex}, {'profile.login': regex}]}

Does that work?

[kfollmer]

Yeah that worked! I'm 95% of the way there, just one last thing.

Currently I am getting my display_name as a user's full name (i.e. John Doe), and as it is now the autocomplete just stops working when you type a space.

For example: If I typed @John and then left the menu up, and there just so happened to be more than one John, is there a way to keep the autocomplete up when I type a space? That would be awesome.

Thanks for the help

[mizzao]

Currently, not unless you use the whole field as the autocomplete, because we can't tell apart spaces in selected items from other word boundaries.

You could modify it yourself in https://github.com/mizzao/meteor-autocomplete/blob/master/autocomplete-client.coffee#L12. I have thought about this a little but I'm not sure what a good way it is to support it without either making it the entire field or just whitespace-separated.

[kfollmer]

Okay, that's no problem.

Thanks for all the help.

If you ever get around to doing it or having an update that works around that, if you could send me a message on here so I get notified that would be awesome.

Thanks again

[dandv]

Just pushed multi-field autocomplete in production for StockBase - thanks @mizzao.

Two minor issues:

1. The docs (here and code (my last code commit, and here) assume in places that there's only one field to match against. Does this need updating in light of multiple-field selectors?
2. The autocomplete template may need to be customized according to what field had matched. How could I pass the match suffix to the template, or fetch it from there, the way it's passed to the selector function?

[dandv]

Re. this comment, I found that { symbol: new RegExp(match, 'i') } was received by the server as symbol: {}. Can RegExp's be serialized correctly?

[mizzao]

@dandv not sure how you implemented multi-field autocomplete. Did you just make multiple rules with the same symbol? Or are you using an $or selector?

Answers to your questions:

1. If you use $or in the selector, you probably want to just fill in one thing for rule.field - so you would probably pick the stock symbol or whatever the canonical representation is.
2. Maybe we could make template take a function as well and pass in the match, in addition to a constant template.

Regarding your second post, use { symbol: { $regex: match, $options: 'i' } }

[dandv]

$or selector:

var orSearch = [
    { symbol: { $regex: match.toUpperCase().regexEscape() } },  // symbols are always uppercase
    { name: { $regex: match.regexEscape(), $options: 'i' } }
  ];

A polymorphic signature for the template would be great (taking a function as well as a template object).

[mizzao]

How many companies are in your DB? Isn't that query going to eat CPU since it's matching in the middle of the string?

To take advantage of indexes, consider making a lowercase key for each company name (as well as the uppercase symbol), and sending a lowercase regex match starting with ^ in the query.

[dandv]

About 20k companies. No performance issues so far, but a secondary key is a good suggestion to have in mind.