Enhance Search performance

[mahmoudhossam]

Is this feature disabled in the current version?

I checked the app, and there's no search box anywhere, am I missing something?

[ahmedre]

no, it's not disabled - it uses the native android search stuff, so there is no need to write a search box in our code. use your android search key (usually on your keyboard or one of the 4 buttons on your screen) to activate it.

for details about implementation, see http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/search/index.html

[mahmoudhossam]

Oh, that.

I think we should add it to the app, many users might not notice something like that.

I've seen other applications with internal search, I don't know how this can be implemented, or whether it's hard or not, but it's been done before.

[ahmedre]

yes insha'Allah - we need to improve it first though (it only searches the active translation, doesn't search the actual arabic text of the quran, etc).

[ahmedre]

note that there are some things i couldn't do much about - i used the "simple clean" text from tanzil, which is imlaei text without tashkeel. however, things like أ versus ا are treated differently. the easy fix would have been to normalize in the database, but that's too risky since a mistake in the script could risk the integrity of the data. instead, i opted to leave it as it is and allow users to search using *.

[mahmoudhossam]

I think that's acceptable, as a start at least.