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CDRH / orchid

Rails Engine for site integration with CDRH API
MIT License
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search results item metadata display issues #102

Open jduss4 opened 5 years ago

jduss4 commented 5 years ago

Needs for various projects:

Example: sorting on "creator name descending" currently might get these results: Fowler, Alice; Whitman, Walt Whitman, Walt Abrams, C.P. ; Wanda, Willa The sorting actually happening is Whitman, Whitman, Wanda, but the display looks like it's out of order.

jduss4 commented 5 years ago

Not sure if we should also make sure that if the sort of a field (let's keep talking creator.name since that's actually my problem at the moment) if being sorted descending.....if therefore the display of the metadata should ALSO be in reverse? or if we should always just sort the creators ascending in the metadata...

techgique commented 5 years ago

Clarification question: Did you mean the sorting happening is Fowler…, Whitman…, Wanda…? Sorting on the beginning of each semi-colon-separated string?

jduss4 commented 5 years ago

Right, so with the API fix which allows sorting in multivalued fields, you can choose whether a sort should be using the minimum value or the maximum value in the the array of fields. When a user clicks "sort ascending by creator" the multivalued search is carried out by using the minimum value, so that it picks "A" instead of "Z" for ascending. Vice versa for a descending search.

However, though the search results being returned should be accurate, the UI doesn't currently present the multivalued field in a particular manner, so for the user it looks confusing when they searched for "ascending" but the top result might be "Whitman" at the beginning of the creators line, even though it was actually returning a result for "Balderdash" which just happened to be displayed second. I think it makes a lot of sense to figure on sorting the multivalued fields when that particular field was relevant to the selected sort.

techgique commented 5 years ago

Thanks for the explanation. I agree, it seems like we should add the flexibility to make certain sorts behave the way we determine more useful or people will probably expect.