This isn't a problem unique to internationalization... it happens in
all sorts of different situations. For example, consider the case of
case-insensitive searches. If you tried to expand the inputs to
include all possible combinations of letter cases you would get 2 to
the X combinations where X is the number of letters in the search
string.
So yes, that is not the normal way to do it. I hate to say that this
is kind of a computer science 101 type of thing, but I guess it is
like those puzzles where the solution isn't obvious until you know the
answer. In this case the common answer is to normalize both sides of
the comparison. In case-insensitive searches that means upper- or
lower-casing both the search string and the string in the database.
That's the concept, now applying it is a little more difficult if the
database doesn't have a function for normalizing to ASCII characters.
There are certainly ways though, like keeping both an original and a
normalized string in the database...
-David
On Mar 26, 2009, at 6:11 PM, Valentina Sirkova wrote:
Thanks David,
Yes, I will probably make use of findParty service.
However the search algorithm might be really hard becuse we might
get huge number of combinations of possible substitutions of the
special characters depending on the size of the string...One simple
example:
We have in the db García. But we search by Garcia - then according
to the mapping table we get the following combinations:
García
Gárciá
Gárcíá
These algorithm might get even more complicated when we try to
enable such "smart" search for more languages.
I would be grateful if someone from the community(maybe french
people also have such problematics) has some tips about this or
knows about some good implementation of this issue.
Thanks : Valentina
On Mar 27, 2009, at 12:35 AM, David E Jones wrote:
It sounds like you want to search for people, and Person is a type
of Party, so you're looking for a Party search.
There is Party search functionality in the Party Manager, it's
actually the main page there (or click on the Find menu button near
the top).
The current functionality does support non-case-sensitive searches,
but does not replace special characters with ASCII characters. You
could somewhat easily modify the findParty service (which is what
the Party Manager Find screen uses) to do that.
-David
On Mar 26, 2009, at 3:48 PM, Valentina Sirkova wrote:
Hi,
I need to implement "smart" search which should not take into
account spanish special characters, but their ascii equivalent
instead, examples are á, í and so on.
For instance we might have entered as a person last name into the
db "García", but when searching we would like to find this last
name no matter if we write "Garcia" or García.
Do we have such functionality in OFBiz and if not could you give
me some suggestions/tips for starting such implementation.
Thanks : Valentina
