[almighty] Worried about search architecture

[Aslak Knutsen]

Open an issue for tracking and propose a solution.

-aslak-

On Thu, Nov 10, 2016 at 3:58 PM, Thomas Mäder <tmader at redhat.com> wrote:

> Hi folks,
>
> as we move to offer more search functionality in our API, I am becoming a
> bit worried about our architecture in that respect. If I look at the search
> service we have written for the "link typeahead" feature, we see code that
> parses a query string in a format that is special to this exact API call,
> and converts it directly into a query on the postgres db.
>
> If we look at what the code does, it could be expressed like this:
>
> searchTerms:= parseSpecialSyntax(queryString)
>
> return select * from work_items i where i.id matches(searchTearms) or
> i.title matches(searchTerms) or i.Description matches(searchTerms)
>
> While the first line is specific to this particular API call, the second
> part can be reused in other queries. I have tried to express this
> separation in the WorkItemRepository.List() method by passing in a tree of
> operators that describes the query instead of a query string.
>
> I am quite open to discuss how we want to offer a search API on our object
> model to the request handlers, but I think that we need an internal search
> API layer that offers what we can search for in a structure way. Query
> parsing for special case queries (for example, parsing well known URLs)
> should not be part of this API, but done in a layer above. This way we can
> reuse a lot of checks (for example for sql injection) and the translation
> to the sql layer. I believe that we will write a bunch of special case
> queries that we will be able to map to a relatively simple set internal
> search API calls.
>
> /Thomas
>
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