I just upgraded and was unhappy to find the search function is still very cumbersome for users. Our members want to be able to quickly find someone on the member list. Right now it is extremely cumbersome to do that unless you know the person's exact name and spelling. Even if I switch to the simple advanced or full advanced choices, it's not user friendly at all.

One should be able to click "search members" and then type a "d" in the last name field for example, and get all the members whose last names begin with d. Right now, if you choose the "any" search, you get everyone who has a D anywhere in their name. Not helpful.

Is there a way to do this? My site isn't even online, but the few members who are testing it universally complained abou this.

Three issues:

1. I tried the "Simple Any word match..." and it still seems to require an exact match.

2. After performing a search and getting the results, the active list reverts to the default list, and subsequent searches are made in the default list, not the list you were searching on before.

3. This is more an enhancement issue. Is it possible to provide a simple, one-box search option that searches all searchable fields for substring (non-exact) matches, and have that box always be displayed so the user doesn't have to click the "Search Users" link to bring it up? Then, you could rename the "Search Users" link "Advanced Search," and when a user clicks on it, they'd see all the default boxes and search options as configured. This is kind of like Google's search page (one simple box) and their "Advanced Search" link which brings up more options.

You lost me there a bit, but I, too, tried the simple any word and it required an exact match. I'm not a programmer, but from a user standpoint, this would seem like an essential functionality issue.

I searched for myself and kjlkjlkj (which is non-existent)... I showed in the search. The Simple Any of search seems to work fine for me. Keep in mind that dropdowns, checkboxes and list fields have set values which limit searches.

Also, from what I'm told, a single input area searching all fields with multiple criteria can eat up host resources, which might be why my former host shut me down three times for high resource usage.

Hi,

Regarding the "Simple Any word..." search, I think I found out what's wrong.

I have 6 lists. The default is "All Members" and then there are 5 smaller lists. I had "All Members" set to "Simple Exact Match" and I was testing the "Staff" list for "Simple Any word" and it wasn't working. I then changed the "All Members" list to "Simple Any word" and then the "Staff" search worked as expected. So it seems like all the other list searches are inheriting the Search attribute from the default list?

This may also be related to the issue #2 I mentioned earlier. If you pick one of the non-default lists and search it, then perform a second search, the second search works on the default list, not your list you were searching earlier.

I did try this on this site, and noticed I couldn't reproduce it here. So I'm wondering what could be different on my site that that is causing the problem... too bad it's on an intranet, otherwise I'd post a link.

Regarding the high resource usage as a reason for not implementing a single-box search, I guess that could be a good reason, although I can't seem to imagine a single MySQL statement causing such high resource usage. If it was a loop that checks one field at a time, maybe... but I imagine it'd be just one statement searching for one value in all fields.

Post edited by: riko, at: 2009/01/28 03:10