Composing queries from sub-queries

[Conal-Tuohy]

(from Martin Bush)

Sometimes query results are cluttered up with racing news; race results, racing form, etc, Horse names can be basically anything, and racing has always been big in Australia.

If you want to exclude racing content, It's possible to use negative queries to identify and exclude a lot of this stuff, but being able to express that "racing" query in a form that could be composed into a large query is potentially useful.

It suggests the need to be able to express sub-queries in a serializable form that can be named and saved, shared, etc, and integrated using a query-builder UI into a larger query by reference.

Queries could be persisted in users' browser local storage, or as cookies.

[Conal-Tuohy]

Such subqueries would need to be integrated into the jQuery-QueryBuilder framework:

One option:

• a virtual "field" corresponding to the record as a whole, i.e. this, perhaps named "Item" or "Entire record")
• a pair of operators "matches" and "doesn't match"
• a value list containing the names of the various saved subqueries

e.g. this item doesn't match racing

Another option:

• two virtual fields: matching and excluding
• a drop-down list of unary operators consisting of the names of the saved subqueries

e.g. excluding racing

[Conal-Tuohy]

There should be a button which a user can use to transclude a subquery (as a group) if they need to customize it specifically for its role in the main query