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enhanced Global Search extensions do not support Wildcards

2025-05-21
2025-05-21
  • Matteo Steiner

    Matteo Steiner - 2025-05-21

    Hello There

    We’re currently using the Enhanced Global Search extension, which replaces the default global search with a faster and more accurate version based on full-text indexing. It has significantly improved performance, and we really appreciate the speed.

    However, we’ve encountered a limitation with the way wildcard searches are handled. In the default global search, we were able to use partial matches more flexibly. For example:

    Searching for testserver correctly returns entries like testserver01, testserver-prod, etc.

    But searching for tserver does not return testserver01, whereas the default search would have matched this.

    It seems the current full-text implementation supports wildcards only after the search term, not before or within it. We’ve tested various wildcard characters (e.g., *, %) without success.

    Is there a way to support this kind of flexible or partial matching as in the original search? It would be very helpful for our users and greatly improve usability. For us, having this functionality is essential in order to integrate the Enhanced Global Search into our production environment.

    Thank you for your time and support!

    Best regards,
    Matteo

     
  • Vincent @ Combodo

    Hi Matteo,
    The way the Enhanced Global search works, is described in the Wiki
    The index mechanism relies on words, searching within words cannot use the index, so cannot be efficient.
    All those limitations are MySQL and MariaDB full-text limitations

     

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