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Silvernitro / pe

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Unable to search for projects without description or tags #3

Open Silvernitro opened 3 years ago

Silvernitro commented 3 years ago

Expected: Since descriptions and tags are optional, some projects don't have them. If a user wishes to see all projects without a description so that he can edit them (maybe he wants to review projects he created in a rush), he should be able to do find d/ or something like that to see all projects without descriptions. Same applies for tags.

Actual: Users cannot find with empty descriptions or tags.

To repro:

  1. Add a project without a description.
  2. Type find d/
  3. Result:

Screenshot 2020-11-13 at 4.50.31 PM.png

nus-se-bot commented 3 years ago

Team's Response

You can actually find projects and tasks that do not contain a description/tag using the match/none feature!

For example: find d/a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 match/none can be used to find projects/tasks with no description.

The command you tried is a short form and while convenient, does not result in a loss of functionality.

For this reason, we chose not to include the shortened syntax you tried to use for our v1.4 release.

Items for the Tester to Verify

:question: Issue response

Team chose [response.NotInScope]

Reason for disagreement: I honestly don't think the team's suggestion to enumerate all possible inputs in the set of alphanumeric characters followed by a matching criteria of "none" is feasible (effectively searching by the complement set).

Firstly, as mentioned in the UG, project descriptions do not have any restrictions and can contain non-alphanumeric characters too. As such, one would have to enumerate all possible characters in order to match none of them. I can imagine this is an inhumane amount. As an example, descriptions can actually contain chinese characters since the team placed no restrictions on descriptions (I tested this during the PE). In such a scenario, one would have to enumerate all possible chinese characters (>50k) in order to perform a "match/none" as suggested. Since the app does not mention any restriction of their target audience to english-typing users, I believe this is a reasonable user behavior. Regardless, if project descriptions use unicode encoding and are not restricted to alphanum characters, then this implies over 1 million possible characters.

Secondly, I'm not sure if the team has proven that this is not in scope anywhere in their documentation since they did not explain that users cannot find projects with empty descriptions. However, I do understand and appreciate that the app did not crash upon execution of the command in the bug report. As such, this is why I chose to categorize this as a feature flaw instead of a functionality flaw.