Searching (WIP)

[Mrmaxmeier]

🚧 WIP

To-dos

• ui and ux that doesn't suck
  • activity indicator
  • empty state
• gc database data
  • after switching tabs
• implement pagination
• hide search behind env var ENABLE_SEARCH=1
• battle the bitrot

[fasterthanlime]

@Mrmaxmeier I recently changed how the game-store passes data down to the app-store (since 0.11.0), so you might want to take a look at that first

[fasterthanlime]

lemme get the icomoon one for you

[fasterthanlime]

@Mrmaxmeier re throttling API calls, it's already handled in util/api.js, take a look near the end of the file, ctrl-f cooldown

[Mrmaxmeier]

@fasterthanlime Can you take a look at the current state of this PR?

Pagination isn't ready yet, because the API doesn't return the total amount of search results.
I personally think the search bar doesn't quite fit in. The loading dimmer isn't really elegant either.
Let me know if there's something that I should change.

[fasterthanlime]

Ah Max, the interaction looks neat! I agree that the UI needs some work
(and I wonder if the search bar shouldn't always be there?)

Anyway I'm currently focused on i18n+preferences with matias, but will take
a look at this soon

On Wed, Dec 23, 2015, 00:01 Mrmaxmeier notifications@github.com wrote:

@fasterthanlime https://github.com/fasterthanlime Can you take a look
at the current state of this PR?

Pagination isn't ready yet, because the API doesn't return the total
amount
https://github.com/itchio/itch/pull/231/files#diff-049047752b1fcc4ac913a85d04af3de9R170
of search results.
I personally think the search bar doesn't quite fit in. The loading dimmer
isn't really elegant either.
Let me know if there's something that I should change.

[image: anim]
https://cloud.githubusercontent.com/assets/3913977/11967710/61f93886-a905-11e5-9d5a-ec8d233f20f9.gif

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub
#231 (comment).

[fasterthanlime]

I've been thinking about this a lot lately and the main issue for me is that we can't cache all search results in the db - it'll get too big. We need a way to mark these game records as "transient" and be able to garbage collect them when we don't need them anymore.

I haven't yet found a reliable way to do that, there's a lot that can happen. For example let's say we had a _fetched_for field in our game db records, that contained a tab name such as "search/goblins".

Whenever we garbage collect the DB, we could see if the tab is still open and remove records whose tabs have been closed - but what if the game has been installed since? Or added to a collection? We need a way to check that too.

Maybe the DB garbage collection routine should first collect all game IDs from collections, owned, etc., so that it knows what not to delete - and then we don't even need _fetched_for

[fasterthanlime]

Hmm, we probably shouldn't fetch all search pages in one go - as opposed to collections which we want to have available offline

[fasterthanlime]

I want to bring this PR and #328 into master so it doesn't bitrot again, but hide it behind environment variables until it's ready.

[Mrmaxmeier]

Discarding all data that isn't visible to the user sounds like it's the best option considering backwards (and forwards) compatibility. Adding _fetched_for might be useful later though.

There are a few options for triggering the gc:

• on startup
• on shutdown
• every x minutes of uptime
• after x db operations

what do you think?
requestIdleCallback could be handy if it works in this situation.

[fasterthanlime]

requestIdleCallback could be handy if it works in this situation.

I didn't know about it! (docs page), sounds interesting

I was thinking of triggering the GC on tab closes & startup

[fasterthanlime]

@Mrmaxmeier finally merged this, already works quite well! Will make a few changes I think.