[Koha] Koha Digest, Vol 80, Issue 38

[Stacy Pober]

How is it that no one has added this kind of searching to the community
version of Koha?  It's a major omission.

People are so used to using quote marks and those operators in search
strings that they often try to use them in Koha even though they don't work
as expected. One of the features in an "easy to use" OPAC is that the
searching conforms to expected norms that the public knows from other
common search interfaces.

This feature was commissioned from the vendor our library uses, PTFS, but
it doesn't work properly. (It kind of works, but if you turn this feature
on, the boolean searching in Advanced Search stops working correctly. As a
result, many of the libraries that have it as an option don't use it.)

I'm astonished that no one in the world has added properly working code
that would make the most widely understood phrase searching method
(quotation marks) available in community Koha.

 As for the + and - operators, if anyone tries adding that, they have to
code it as a two-character string (space+ or space-) to prevent confusion
when users are looking for hyphenated words.

Is anyone in the Koha-verse working on adding a search mode that
uses quotation marks and + - operators?  I mean, aside from the buggy
version we have in Liblime's LAK.


-- 
Stacy Pober
Information Alchemist
[speaking for myself,  not representing any institution or group]
Riverdale, NY 10471
stacy.pober at manhattan.edu



On Mon, Jun 25, 2012 at 9:18 AM, <koha-request at lists.katipo.co.nz> wrote:

From: Robin Sheat <robin at catalyst.net.nz>
To: koha at lists.katipo.co.nz
Subject: Re: [Koha] Spell-check/ Did you mean
Message-ID: <4FE8322C.5050207 at catalyst.net.nz>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8

Op 22-06-12 21:29, Paul schreef:
> Searching for "nature defecit" *with* the double quotes fails -- this I
> expect, as the quotes eliminate fuzziness.
>
> Searching for nature defecit (no quotes) works perfectly.
>
> Searching for "nature-deficit" (with quotes) fails; I am only
> semi-surprised as the logic of the - (minus sign) is to search for the
> phrase without the term after the minus.  However +nature -deficit also
> finds that title alone and in my opinion should not (but my opinion is
> not definitive.)

Koha doesn't understand "phrase searching" and +with -without operators
by default. It's possible to construct queries that will, but in general
it doesn't.

--
Robin Sheat
Catalyst IT Ltd.
? +64 4 803 2204
GPG: 5957 6D23 8B16 EFAB FEF8  7175 14D3 6485 A99C EB6D