Re: [VuFind-Tech] YAML and colon

[Demian K. <dem...@vi...>]

> This is unfortunately a fairly complicated problem.  What is happening is that
> VuFind tries to detect advanced Solr syntax so that it doesn't munge something
> that it shouldn't.

This also relates to the VUFIND-601 ticket here:

http://vufind.org/jira/browse/VUFIND-601

This ticket improves the advanced search detection logic to prevent escaped colons/brackets from being treated as advanced queries.  That's probably a worthwhile improvement to VuFind in general, but it doesn't exactly help you -- I'm guessing that the whole point of your munge is to escape colons so that users don't have to understand about the subtleties of Solr querying when searching for call numbers that happen to include colons!

I suppose one other possible approach might be to create a new "no results" recommendation module -- the "EscapeQueryRecommend" -- which checks for problem characters in a query and escapes them for the user.  So then a search for something containing a colon would go to an error page with a "click here to try a better search" link, and that link would work correctly (in combination with VUFIND-601).  This is obviously not the best solution to the problem... but it might be a piece worth adding to the puzzle, since it could be helpful in assisting users who enter other edge-case queries that get misinterpreted as advanced searches.

- Demian