Feature Proposal: Enhance SEARCH to allow searching by create date

Motivation

There is already an option to search by date (which was discussed in SearchByDate before added to TWiki), but this allows only to search by modified date - read: the date of the last revision. I'm looking for an option to search for a/the create date timespan. I will give one of many possible scenarios which is not possible without such a create date search feature.

The Scenario:

You want to traverse some pages by their create date, e.g. News Entries or Todo tasks. You could place a search on this site which searches the "next" entry by searching for all entries created later ($now/P50y excluding itself), ordering them by create date (which is already possible with order="created") and reducing the result to one (limit="1"). Analogous you can search for a "previously" created entry.

What do you think?

To clarify it and say it in other words. You can sort your search results by create date already, but at the moment you can not search for a specific create date.

Description and Documentation

Request of a SEARCH enhancement to allow searching by create date.

The Syntax for the date specification should be the same as described in SearchByDate.

Examples

To search for all pages with begin with "NewsEntry" and are created in the year 2005, wether they are edited later in 2006 or not:

%SEARCH{"NewsEntry.*" type="regex" scope="topic" createdate="2003"}%

This fit well into existing syntax and features of SEARCH but make SEARCH more feature complete (in terms of consistent).

Impact and Available Solutions

Implementation

Please see the attached patch: twiki-4.0.1-search-by-createdate.patch and Bugs:Item2000.

-- Contributors: TobiasRoeser

Discussion

-- TobiasRoeser - 28 Mar 2006

• twiki-4.0.1-search-by-createdate.patch: Add search by createdate option to SEARCH

Ok, I created a patch against TWiki-4.0.1 and opened an bug report as Bugs:Item2000.

Please comment here or there. I'm using this on my site, so it works, but please test yourself before using on a production system!

-- TobiasRoeser - 31 Mar 2006

Hmmm, createdate is working, but I'm still not able to do what I want. Now, I determined, that REVINFO is not able to provide a date string with the right format to use in TimeInterval. So, time for the next patch/enhancement.

Maybe, I/we need a Plugin, that provide just regex processing to the page author? I have to investigate the SpreadSheetPlugin a second time...

-- TobiasRoeser - 31 Mar 2006

I now fond a solution to implement some kind of navigation bar to walk through pages based on creating dates.

The following example shows how to traverse through all pages with the prefix "News-". This Example assumes, that a createdate capable SEARCH version is available - see Bugs:Item2000 or just apply the patch mentioned above.

<!-- the create date of the page -->
%CALC{"$SET( tmp_time, $TIME(%REVINFO{"$time" topic="%BASETOPIC%" rev="1.1"}%) )"}%
<!-- the date formated for use with TWiki.TimeInterval -->
%CALC{"$SET( my_time, $FORMATTIME( $GET( tmp_time ), $year-$month-$dayT$hour:$minute:$seconds ) )"}%
<!-- same as above with workaround for previous page -->
%CALC{"$SET( my_time2, $FORMATTIME( $EVAL( $GET( tmp_time ) - 3600 ), $year-$month-$dayT$hour:$minute:$seconds ) )"}%

<!-- Link to the next newer pages -->
%SEARCH{"News-" scope="topic" nosearch="on" createdate="%CALC{"$GET( my_time )"}%/P10y" order="created" limit="1" nototal="on" noheader="on" format="[[$web.$topic][<< Newer $topic]]"}% 
<!-- Link to the next older page. -->
%SEARCH{"News-" scope="topic" nosearch="on" createdate="P10y/%CALC{"$GET( my_time2 )"}%" order="created" reverse="on" limit="1" nototal="on" noheader="on" format="[[$web.$topic][Older >> $topic]]"}%

I got some strange behavior with is may be related to TimeInterval. The second search gives not the next page but the identical which makes the Link useless. One workaround is to substract one hour (1 or 10 minutes didn't work), which work for me except for the first newest page.

Any help and tests welcome.

-- TobiasRoeser - 01 Apr 2006

Could please some one (of the core devs) comment on this page and Bugs:Item2000 too?

Is no one interested in such feature? Are there not enought resources to test? Is the patch bad? Is it the wrong time to post enhancement, as we are trying to consolidate and speedup TWikiVariables?

Please no longer ignore Bug reports and reporters, or the community will go away. If no one need this nor likes this nor want this, please tell this to the contributor/bug reporter (in this case me). No feedback means or can be understand as: What do you want here? Go away and look for another OSS project, we don't like your contributions?

-- TobiasRoeser - 06 Apr 2006

The patch for the documentation is attached as: TWiki-4.0.x-search-by-createdate-doc.patch

-- TobiasRoeser - 22 Apr 2006