Naming Conventions

[vsoch]

As discussed in https://github.com/vsoch/freegenes/issues/113, since there are no naming conventions for various objects (aside from tags) we can't easily parse a search query to do something like remove invalid / uninteresting characters, as we might actually lose a result. This issue is opened for discussion and future work around developing a standard. What will need to be done is:

• creating a standard for different types that can be searched
• updating all models to conform to the standard
• then doing a custom save to convert the input value to the standard, and if it doesn't pass validation (likely a regexp) then throw an error (return message to user)

Once this is done, the search query can be further parsed without worrying about losing content.

[marc4-stanford]

What is considered white space/word delmiters? Are a space, comma, underscore, dash, period, end of line, etc all treated word terminators?

[vsoch]

This is largely up to the FreeGenes team to decide - with regular expressions we can parse the search query input however is desired. Currently there is no parsing.

[vsoch]

You can read about queries here we have a custom query based on the model type that looks over a subset of fields using icontains. For example:

def distributions_query(q):
    '''specific search for distributions
    '''
    return Distribution.objects.filter(
                    Q(name__icontains=q) |
                    Q(description__icontains=q)).distinct()

where q is whatever is provided by the user, and icontains ensures that casing doesn't matter. See here for the functions and full logic for each model.