Could you add an additional view for searches done in the search bar at the top of the screen? Most useful would be a link with an excerpt highlighting the text that the search is hitting on, 3-5 lines worth of surrounding text. None of the current views do that, as far as I can tell, which makes it difficult for a user to evaluate which search results are actually the ones they're after. The default closed view provides no context whatsoever, and remaining in a search result view to actually read the card is a weird experience. Maybe user testing would prove it's not unwelcome? But it's certainly unfamiliar given how most of the web provides search results.
Oops, marked this "answered" but forgot to save the answer:
You can edit the WQL on the card named "*search" to alter the search handling. Adding a "view" directive should address the above.
That will let you choose a different view, but there is no view available right now that highlights search terms and/or shows 3-5 lines of surrounding text. Sounds like a good idea, but it would need to be a little "smarter" than most views to be able to deal with the search term.
I know I can choose a different view, but as John says, what I'm suggesting is a whole new view entirely. I can't concatenate the type of result I'm talking about from existing views. It would be something like a Link + Content, but with hit highlighting and a dynamic extract of the Content. Even one line of content with the hit lighting would serve, I think. It's just enough to give users and idea of whether the information they're after is actually to be found at this result if they follow it. Given that the site I'm building has a lot of blocks of text, having some idea where their search term appears by having some surrounding text in the result would help in narrowing down where they should look.
Also, if I alter the WQL in *search, what other searches is it going to affect? Any? Or just the results of the search bar on the top?
just navbox searches.
Good to know. Although upon thinking about it more, unless the navbox can tell what my permission level is and change itself based on that, altering its search rule would solve one problem and create another. As an admin, I still need to be able to find results that users would not need to find. If I exclude the results for them, I exclude them for me, too, right?
Right. I don't know if this helps, but if the permissions on the cards to be found is set so that people other than you can't see them at all, they won't see them in search results.
Also, we have thought before that context for search results would be a good idea. I don't think it's on our roadmap to do any time soon, but you can track our progress and offer any input on it at highlight search terms in results.
Yeah. I had thought that if I set the permissions on just the master plus card, specifically saying that it didn't apply to the set of all plus cards with that name that it would only hide the blank master card. Which is not what happens. I was trying to cut down on blank/useless site search results.
I think that you're saying that you need permissions on B to see A+B. That's not the case.
I can tell you exactly what I did. I went to the cards "Written by" and "Directed by" and set them Read: Admin. These only appears as [episodename]+written by and [episodename]+directed by when actually used, that's where the data is. When you do that, the *listedin query (which searches in written_by and directed_by) which uses a virtual card to create a list of links on, say, Russell Mulcahy's card no longer returns any results for regular users. But it will return results if I'm logged in and look at Russell's card. Unless there's something else in play, it's the permissions on "Written by" and "Directed by" that make the difference in seeing the results.
Ah, ok, it's the WQL that requires it. OK, I'll ticket that.