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[mezis]

Idea titles should have more "weight".

Investigate use of fuzzily or use an external service.

[thejspr]

Could we as an MVP search on idea (title, problem, solution, metrics) using postgres full text search (https://github.com/textacular/textacular) and displaying the results on a separate page?

[mezis]

We could do that. Probably bearing in mind that we'd want it as an API down the line so we can have a nice search box in the header. What resource are you thinking? GET /ideas?q=query or POST /search?q=query ?

[thejspr]

We could easily build it as an API to begin with and then consume it via JavaScript (Vanilla/Backbone/Ember/Angular/Etc.). Thoughts?

[mezis]

That sounds like a plan. While I'm always slightly wary of making the DB do things it shouldn't, as long as things are well decoupled I don't mind.

For instance, Appfab stores attachments in the DB through Dragonfly and the custom Storage::File backend. The owner models don't know about any implementation details and just hold an ID for the attachments.

I'd suggest doing the same—instead of adding search indices to the Idea or Comment models, have a separate SearchableItems model that holds a copy of the text + references to the original models (syncing could be synchronous, async, or scheduled every 10min for instance). I think it'd be much easier to rip out / replace should we want to later.

Thoughts?

[thejspr]

I like the idea of the models not knowing/caring about the search functionality, but duplicating the content seems too complex for a first iteration IMO. Especially as we don't need to add any indices, unless the search is slow in which case we can add full-text search indices. Alternatively we can create a database view (under tips and tricks) giving us the separation of concerns, whilst not having to worry about syncing the data.

In terms of JS, do you have a framework preference? I'd suggest Backbone as it's very flexible and the only one I know :)

[mezis]

Let's close this for now. We can go post-MVP at a later point.