Search public topics and PMs simultaneously

[david (David Taylor)]

Continuing the discussion from Create/See and Create Permissions (again):

@hartz

run a single search query in a way that matches both public topics and private messages (right now it seems I can search for public topics or private messages but not both, unless I’m missing something).

@hartz

it would be fantastic if I had some way to quickly answer the question of “What are all of the threads I might need to respond to right now?” regardless of whether they were public or private, and to refine that based on tags, etc.

I think this is a great idea. At the moment we have the in:private modifier to search PMs, so maybe something similar like in:all or in:everywhere?

[hartz (adam hartz)]

@david: Thanks for making this thread (I was going to wait until I had some code ). I hacked on this a little bit between meetings yesterday and this morning, and I have a proof of concept that adds an in:all search tag: https://github.com/adqm/discourse/tree/search_all

A few things worth thinking about:

• This is just a quick hack, and I’ve not really tested except with a small little test instance with a couple of posts.
• Is in:all the right name?
• It might be nice to be able to see in the lst which of the results are PMs and which are topics
• It needs a checkbox in the “advanced search” window

I’m happy to keep hacking at it when I have time. And I don’t really know Ruby, Rails, or the Discourse codebase at all yet, so any feedback and constructive criticism is definitely welcome!

[david (David Taylor)]

Awesome! Please do open a PR once you’re ready, and then people can comment more easily.

@hartz

Is in:all the right name?

I think it’s ok, unless anyone has any better ideas? cc @codinghorror?

@hartz

• It might be nice to be able to see in the lst which of the results are PMs and which are topics

It would, but I wouldn’t worry about that to start with. That can be a later PR.

@hartz

• It needs a checkbox in the “advanced search” window

Again, this would be nice, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be done at the same time. This is a pretty power-user-targeted feature anyway.

[hartz (adam hartz)]

@david

Please do open a PR once you’re ready

After poking it a bit more, turns out it’s not quite ready yet…but I’ll keep messing with it, and I’ll submit a PR when I squash the bugs I know about.

[hartz (adam hartz)]

Just opened a PR. Happy for thoughts, feedback, and criticism!

[sam (Sam Saffron)]

@david

I think it’s ok, unless anyone has any better ideas?

in:all is fine in:everything is too much to type imo.

[david (David Taylor)]

Thanks to @hartz, this is now implemented

https://github.com/discourse/discourse/commit/e0605029dc58c681e61400042763aa8a43c584c7

You can use in:all to search your PMs and public topics in one place. For example:

[codinghorror (Jeff Atwood)]

Hmm. Shouldn’t PM results have the PM envelope next to the result? Otherwise how do you know which is which?

[david (David Taylor)]

Yeah that would be good. @hartz actually already suggested that but I pushed for getting the basic feature in first.

@hartz

• It might be nice to be able to see in the lst which of the results are PMs and which are topics

@hartz would you like to try and get this working in a second PR? If not I can take a look at it.

[hartz (adam hartz)]

@david

@hartz would you like to try and get this working in a second PR? If not I can take a look at it.

Sure, I’m happy to give it a shot. I’m interested to poke around a bit more in the codebase (since I’m not sure I quite have the lay of the land yet), and this would be a good way to do it.

But it will be several days, probably, before I’m able to take a real look, so if you wanted to jump in and take care of it, that’s cool, too.

[hartz (adam hartz)]

@david: I finally had a chance to take a look at this (differentiating the display of PMs and topics in search results), and I have an inelegant hack in place locally that seems to work, but that probably needs quite a bit of refinement. Should I open a separate topic in the dev category or something like that if I think it’s not quite ready for prime-time, or should I just open a PR and use that as the place for discussion?

[david (David Taylor)]

If you have something working, a PR would be great - makes it easier to comment on specific parts of the code. If you like, github has a new “Draft PR” feature (hit the arrow next to “create pull request” before you submit it).

[hartz (adam hartz)]

OK, sounds good, thanks! I just put in a PR.

[david (David Taylor)]

The icon is now merged - thanks @hartz