[Refdb-users] web query

[Markus H. <mar...@mh...>]

Hi Bruce,

Bruce D'Arcus writes:
 > 
 > I kind expect to be able to type a partial author and have the web 
 > client return results.

Rightfully so...

 >  I want to type just "Doe" rather than "Doe, 
 > John Q."  In the absence of this, how do I get this behavior?  I can't 
 > seem to figure it out from the docs.
 > 

I assume you're using SQLite as the db engine? This is unfortunately
one of the weak spots where the implementation of the database engine
shines through. Just to make it clear, this has nothing to do with the
web interface. The command line client shows exactly the same
behaviour.

Both MySQL and PostgreSQL support RLIKE (regexp like)
comparisons. They work as expected. If you search for an author with
the string "Doe", you'll get "Doe, John Q." as well as "DiDoe,M." or
any other author whose name contains the character
sequence"Doe". SQLite does not support RLIKE, so refdbd has to use
LIKE instead. This one uses the much simpler SQL regexps and does not
perform partial matches by default. In order to find all Does in your
database, you'll have to search for "Doe%" which means "Doe" followed
by zero or more arbitrary characters. This is a minor inconvenience
when using SQLite.

BTW these nasty details are covered in the sections "The query
language" and "Regular expressions" in chapter 13 of the manual.

regards,

Markus

-- 
Markus Hoenicka
mar...@ca...
(Spam-protected email: replace the quadrupeds with "mhoenicka")
http://www.mhoenicka.de