[Thomas]

Hi!

I have a strange error with the search function (cMap template, if this makes a difference):

If I, for example, search for “jour”, I find a record that has “Journalistin” in a field. That’s fine.

If I search for “journal”, I don’t find it, with “journali”, I find it, with “journalist”, I don’t find it, and with “journalistin”, it is there again.

Do you have any idea what causes this behaviour?

One more thing: is it possible to include categories when searching?

Thanks, br,
Thomas

[Steven Zahm]

@ Thomas

Can you please provide a link to your directory page so I can take a look?

[Thomas]

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[Steven Zahm]

@ Thomas

Being able to see the screen without being able to dive into the actual queries is not going to help much. How about…

• pasting the contents of the system info here as a private reply.
• a screenshot of the search settings
• a screenshot of the entry edit page “Journalistin” in a field that is searchable but not being found with partial keyword searches.
• the exact shortcode used on the directory page.

That’s all I can think of at the moment.

[Thomas]

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[Thomas]

This reply has been marked as private.

[Steven Zahm]

@ Thomas

The login/pass worked to get to the site but it still requires a login to view the directory.

The LIKE query is basic. It simply matches words that begin with the keywords that were entered in the selected fields.

The FULLTEXT is more complex but this is handled by the database, not Connections. The database matches against the keyword terms that were entered and orders the results according to a score in the selected fields.

As to why “jour” was working and “journal” was not…

The FULLTEXT is matching against the whole word, not a partial like the LIKE query. Now, when a FULLTEXT query returns zero results, it’ll fallback to a LIKE query automatically.

So with FULLTEXT enabled here’s what was happening so you can see why you were getting the results you were:

• “jour” (found) — No FULLTEXT results, fallback to LIKE, returns partial match results.
• “journal” (not found) — found FULLTEXT results, no fallback to LIKE, returns FULLTEXT whole word matches
• “journali” (found) — No FULLTEXT results, fallback to LIKE, returns partial match results.
• “journalist” (not found) — found FULLTEXT results, no fallback to LIKE, returns FULLTEXT whole word matches
• “journalistin” (found) — found FULLTEXT results, no fallback to LIKE, returns FULLTEXT whole word matches

With LIKE only enabled, you will always receive matches to keywords that being with the entered terms.

All this said, it does sound like everything is work quite correctly.

At one point I did have the FULLTEXT configured to do keyword begins with queries but the feedback I received from quite a few others was that is returned results were too “wide” to be useful. So I made FULLTEXT query whole word only and that seems to satisfy most nearly everyone.

Now, if you really want to have partial term matching with FULLTEXT, there is a filter which you can hook into with a bit of PHP code to change FULLTEXT query back to partial term matching. (NOTE: this will be terms that start with only, FULLTEXT does not support partial match where the term ins within the word).

I hope this thoroughly answers your question.

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