Feature Proposals » Combine Jump box and Search box

Motivation

To provide a single unified box which "does the right thing" in handling what is currently done with (a) the JumpBox, (b) the search page and several search boxes.

Description and Examples

1. Use single search box, no submit button
   • Keep Jump box functionality in core (for older skins)
2. Type exact word of topic, case insensitive: Jump to topic
   • Example: webnotify
3. Type exact word of web.topic, case insensitive: Jump to topic in other web
   • Example: sandbox.webnotify
4. Type j:name or j/name to jump to a topic if exist, else show a list of similar topics (current JumpBox functionality)
   • Example: j:notify
5. Type a:any text or a/any text to search text in all webs
   • Example: a:jimmy neutron
6. Else: Do normal search in current web
   • Example: jimmy neutron -- keyword search
   • Example: "jimmy neutron" -- literal search

Documentation

TBD

Impact

Implementation

TBD

-- Contributors: PeterThoeny - 2010-10-22

Discussion

This feature was first proposed at GoIsSearch in - gosh - 2002. I committed to the feature in GoIsSearch on 2010-10-22, and have externalized it to this new proposal.

-- PeterThoeny - 2010-10-25

As for implementation, not sure if best to:

1. enhance the topic parameter to the view script (currently used by the JumpBox feature)
2. enhance the SEARCH variable (currently used by the WebSearch page that is the form action of the search box)

I tend to lean towards 2, SEARCH. It seems more flexible. The additional functionality for this smart search could be enabled by a smart="on" parameter, set as a hidden form field in the search box.

-- PeterThoeny - 2010-11-02

This is now an accepted proposal by the 7 days feedback period.

-- PeterThoeny - 2010-11-08

Peter, I created a live jump box for our organizations use. It uses AJAX to populate a select dropdown, as the User types into the field. This uses a new bin script SuggestTopic which returns the possible completions as the User types. This could be combined with what you doing.

-- CraigMeyer - 2010-12-05

Interesting. There is also an AutoCompletePlugin that can be used to pick a topic while typing. We can't use this with preloaded topic list on every topic, it would be very slow in webs that have 50K topics. It is OK if done with an Ajax call to load the list dynamically.

-- PeterThoeny - 2010-12-05