SQL Full Text Search Terrible?

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NC Software
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SQL Full Text Search Terrible?

Post by NC Software » Sat Jul 16, 2016 1:11 pm

I am starting out with the path from 707 to R12 or at least that's my plan. I installed the R12 with sample data and configured the admin for the most part. As I'm using SQL Server 2014 I enabled SQL Full Text Search as the option in admin AND rebuilt the index. I went to advanced search on the store side and entered COMP to see if it would pickup the sample computer products. IT DID NOT. Wow, disappointing. Rebuilt again and retried the search bar and advanced search, again NO RESULTS. Sad! Switched to Lucene and that does work. Disappointing my server based search system is not able to handle this. I don't want Lucene...

Other disappointments, the admin UI seems like mid 1990's in fonts and screen real-estate, very hard to read in this day and age. Consider google fonts, serif fonts, larger fonts, review and revise for readability and ease of use. Menus should have no delay, no fade effect, I need to see the options right away, not have fancy effects. Really needs some modernization - this is what your prospective customers first see after the store side and it's not a great selling point.

Well, back to tinkering...
Neal Culiner
NC Software, Inc.

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Katie
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Re: SQL Full Text Search Terrible?

Post by Katie » Mon Jul 18, 2016 5:51 am

Although I don't know the exact differences between all the search providers, I know that FTS has some limitations. We addressed an issue last year with special characters in the search terms which had to be fixed by using a combination of FTS and regular SQL. You don't have to use Lucene. The std SQL seach will return results with "COMP". If you use FTS with "COMP" and a wildcard, then it will return the results you are expecting. But this really need to be an option for the merchant. If you had a store with 100,000 products, then I doubt you would want the search to automatically append a wildcard. On the other hand, if you had a store with 500 products, then you might want this option.

We are aware the admin UI looks outdated. We have existing feature requests to add a responsive mobile-friendly admin, which we are looking to add in a future version. It is a lot of work but it is fairly high on the list of features we want to add.

The delay effect on the admin menu was added quite awhile ago because merchants were complaining that the menu system kept dropping down when they didn't want it to. I'll try and see if I can find the code so you can change it back to a 0 sec. delay.

Thanks for your feedback,

Katie
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NC Software
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Re: SQL Full Text Search Terrible?

Post by NC Software » Mon Jul 18, 2016 5:55 am

I tried *comp* and that search term was rejected, I think wild cards aren't allowed? SQL FTS if done right should be great and you should get results on COMP - but whatever, I'll just use lucene or whatever works. But I wouldn't just ignore this, it's a bug that needs to be addressed. SQL FTS with CONTAINS will be just fine I don't care how large a store you have. The code needs to cap the max results returned, i.e. never return ALL such as 1 million records, find a logical max. Standard practice in search systems.
Neal Culiner
NC Software, Inc.

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Katie
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Re: SQL Full Text Search Terrible?

Post by Katie » Mon Jul 18, 2016 6:06 am

You can change the hover delay on the admin menu by editing "interval" in \website\scripts\hoverIntent.js file

// default configuration values
var cfg = {
interval: 150,
sensitivity: 7,
timeout: 0
};
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NC Software
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Re: SQL Full Text Search Terrible?

Post by NC Software » Mon Jul 18, 2016 6:17 am

Thanks Katy, not critical but something I prefer so I'm glad I can control it.
Neal Culiner
NC Software, Inc.

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