| Issue 3015: | Documentation: "Similar to many popular search engines..." is very misleading | |
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***** NOTE: THIS BUG TRACKER IS FOR GERRIT CODE REVIEW *****
***** DO NOT SUBMIT BUGS FOR CHROME, ANDROID, INTERNAL *****
***** ISSUES WITH YOUR COMPANY'S GERRIT SETUP, ETC. *****
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Affected Version: 2.9.1
What steps will reproduce the problem?
1. Enter some text ("blah" or "123") into the search box and click the Search button
What is the expected output? What do you see instead?
I would hope that this would show me all code reviews containing that text in one of the fields.
Instead, I get the "scary screen" with either "Unsupported query:blah" (if non-numeric), or "The page you requested was not found, or you do not have permission to view this page." if numeric.
Please provide any additional information below.
From the documentation: "Similar to many popular search engines on the web, just enter some text and let Gerrit figure out the meaning:". This is followed by a few examples, none of which imply that whatever you type will be found in any field, but nothing indicates it won't either.
If the documentation is going to make such a statement ("similar to many popular search engines on the web"), it really should be as easy to use as google. If the search feature cannot search within one or all of the primary text fields without a search specifier, this really needs to be stated up front.
PREFERRED: really make it as easy to use as implied. Why couldn't bare search terms be treated as "match any field"? If users get too many results, they will look deeper for ways to limit them. Otherwise, they will just be happy that it's easy to find stuff without RTFMing.
AT A MINIMUM: fix the documentation to be consistent with reality
Nov 15, 2014
#1
richard.moehn@googlemail.com
Nov 19, 2014
Well, it is not uncommon at all for search tools to be overloaded, and generally if the more specific case fails, they fall back to a more generic interpretation. I admit I haven't used Gerrit enough to know what the Legacy ID is, so... how many people still use it? And how unique-looking are those numbers? What if, on failure to find Legacy ID, the search just searched all fields and returned those results? The worst scenario I can think of is someone entering a legacy ID (incorrectly), and being baffled that they get (possibly empty) search results instead of a message saying "you screwed up". To me, that seems acceptable. The other possible confusion would be someone that gets used to the general search behavior using a single numeric term, and then runs into a case where they accidentally match a legacy ID. That could be confusing, but again I'm not sure how likely. I happened to run into it because there was a code review I needed to find where the only obvious search term was a bare number. As long as there's some way to force a general search for a number (enclosing in quotes, maybe?), I'd be happy.
Nov 21, 2014
I agree. It would also be sensible indeed to return empty search results on a “wrong” number. By the way, you probably have seen the Legacy ID and it doesn't look unique at all. It's the number in the upper left of the change screen or the number in the URL of a change, respectively. In a past project I found it quite handy to use a search keyword in the browser, so that I could type “gr 61704” in the search bar and it would open https://gerrit-review.googlesource.com/#/c/61704/. On the other hand it's called “legacy”, so I'm not sure if there's plans to get rid of it or not. Forcing a general search for a number… Enclosing it in quotes apparently does a real search (and not an “open”) on Legacy IDs. If you search “"61704"”, it returns a list with only change 61704. If you search “"123"”, it returns an empty result list. It doesn't perform a general search, however. But you can force a search for a number in a commit message like this: “message:123”. Or in a comment like this: “comment:123” Or both like this “message:123 OR comment:123”. Would that be enough for your purposes? |
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