Ticket #2585 (new enhancement)
Escape solr control characters in search queries, add advanced search screen
| Reported by: | seanh | Owned by: | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Priority: | awaiting triage | Milestone: | ckan-v1.9 |
| Component: | ckan | Keywords: | solr |
| Cc: | Repository: | ckan | |
| Theme: | none |
Description
Suggestion from David Read:
We noticed that some search queries produce unexpected search results in CKAN, due to them containing special characters. For example if you were to search for "Spend over £25,000 - NHS Leeds" then it would not come up with the dataset with that exact name. It was excluding datasets with the word "NHS" due to the dash/minus sign. It works fine if you escape the minus sign: "Spend over £25,000 \- NHS Leeds".
So in data.gov.uk I've added escaping of such control characters in our plugin and this useful routine:
http://fragmentsofcode.wordpress.com/2010/03/10/escape-special-characters-for-solrlucene-query/
Perhaps you would consider providing this in CKAN core in future?
I think there is an occasional case when power users would want to use the special characters - brackets, +, -, boolean operators etc. but maybe these could be reserved for an 'advanced search' screen?
