More versatile user search functionality

Since we're having quite a huge amount of users from different institutions, the need for more advances user search functionality has arisen!

Specifically, a user asked whether searching for a user in the sharing dialog (and thereby using the search-user API) can be augmented to also search in the institution field.

Now I understand that it might be difficult to simply use all words from the search query string to also search for institutions as that would be kind of fuzzy. Maybe a more easy and useful solution would be to simply add a checkbox to toggle whether to search users only in the own institution (or a selection listing all available institutions?)?

From the admin side of things, I would like to have a configurable option to specify how many results the search function shall return (currently hardcoded to 10).

FWIW, as a small workaround for convenience, I added the following custom function, which tries to at least sort the list such that users from the own institution (or having the same email domain) are listed first:

def custom_search_user(request, emails):
    emails_front, emails_back = [], []

    institution_name = ''

    username = request.user.username
    user_domain = username.split('@', 1)[1]
    profile = Profile.objects.get_profile_by_user(username)
    if profile:
        institution_name = profile.institution

    for email in emails:
        email_domain = email.split('@', 1)[1]
        if email_domain == user_domain:
            emails_front.append(email)
        else:
            p = Profile.objects.get_profile_by_user(email)
            logger.debug(f'{email=} {p=}')
            if p and p.institution and institution_name in p.institution:
                emails_front.append(email)
            else:
                emails_back.append(email)

    logger.debug(f'{emails_front=} {emails_back=}')
    return emails_front + emails_back

haiwen / seahub

More versatile user search functionality #6024