Advanced search syntax

[tdfischer]

It'd be most excellent to be able to query Spiff for certain things in a semi-structured way. Searching for, eg:

hasMeta:part-bin-unit

Would return all Resources that have the 'part-bin-unit' metadata.

A more advanced query:

meta:part-bin-row = 8 AND (meta:part-type = resistor OR meta:part-type = transistor)

This would find all resistors and transistors in all row 8s of all the parts bins .

A feature like this could be used to keep track of parts bins and their locations in Spiff. Looking for a resistor between 100 and 200 Ohms?

meta:part-type = resistor AND (meta:resistor-value <= 200 AND meta:resistor-value >= 100)

Build a quick Qt or even plain PHP app that sits fullscreen on a kiosk next to the parts bins and you have an instant part locator system. Add a button to it that toggles the 'in-stock' metadata value between true/false, and you can quickly see what you are out of stock of:

meta:in-stock = true

See what resources are going to be tied up next week:

resource:reserved AND (event:start > next monday AND event:end < next friday)

See what resources are reserved for a specific event:

resource:reserved AND event:id = 82

Find the top three people trained on any of the three circular saws:

(resource:id = 4 OR resource:id=8 OR resource:id = 83) AND member:training < 3

Proposed keywords:

• resource:meta: - Evaluates to the value of a resource's metadata
• resource:hasMeta: - Evaluates to true if a resource has a specific metadata, regardless of value
• resource:reserved: - Evaluates if a resource is attached to an event or not
• resource:id
• event:start - Evaluates to an event's start date.
• event:end - Evaluates to an event's end date
• event:id - Evaluates to an event's ID.
• member:training - Evaluates to a member's relative training rank on resources, with zero being the highest rank of all users trained for a resource.

[relrod]

Rather than implementing a custom lexer/logic parser/etc, would it be reasonable to look into using something like Lucene here?

[tdfischer]

Sounds like an awful lot of overkill. I want as few dependencies with Spiff as possible so other less tech savy spaces can get things up and running without any effort.

[relrod]

That's fine, but I suspect it's going to take quite a lot of work to implement something like this from scratch.