Boolean no longer working

[Philip Tate]

Hi,
I had a saved Boolean search that was working until 2.2.2(511). “X” OR “Y” OR “Z” now returns nothing.

[Jim Burgess]

I can confirm this. As well, simple search terms typed into the Search field no longer work as they did in Ver 2.2.1.

[Brendan]

Hi Philip and Jim,

So I had a problem with the FTS4 search engine in SQLite. I don’t know why, but it was taking over 40 seconds to display a mere 18 records from a form that contained 9000 records. And that was on my very fast MacBook Pro! I did some tests with turning off the search engine and results came back within a couple of seconds. So in version 2.2.2 I disabled the FTS search engine. But I’m thinking I need to turn it back on. I didn’t know if anyone was using the OR functionality as I hadn’t really documented it anywhere.

I was going to do some further investigations to see if I can figure out why it was taking so long to return the records.

Sorry for this change in behaviour.

Thanks,

Brendan

[Brendan]

The one benefit of not using the search engine is you can do substring searches though. If I switch back, you won’t be able to do that. So you could find records than contain “Apple” if your search term was simply “ppl”.

[Philip Tate]

Good luck. What I want, of course, is very vast Boolean substring searches, but if I have to compromise I’d like to have the Boolean capability. Other users likely have different preferences. For what it’s worth, I recently got a Mac Mini with a fusion drive, and TapForms (and everything else) is much faster than my two year old Macbook Pro. The CPU is I7 opposed to I5, but the RAM is the same (8GB). Those long waits for recalculations I used to complain about are now very tolerable.

[Jim Burgess]

Brendan,
I feel the advantages of having the boolean search capability override substring searches. For a couple of reasons– (1) boolean searches provide a more flexible and powerful search capability, and (2) substring searches can lead to unwanted records being returned (false positives). Not to complicate it too much, but the ability to enter Like syntax, e.g. LIKE ‘%ppl%’ might be a future consideration.

I hope you can resolve the performance issues… FTS appears to be powerful, but pretty complicated as well.

Thanks.

[Brendan]

I’ve already switched back to the FTS engine for the next update so you’ll get your boolean searches back. I never released the change to the iOS version, so that’s still using FTS. When I disabled using FTS, Tap Forms was using LIKE “%ppl%” in the code. It actually automatically does that for Japanese, Chinese, and Korean languages. That’s because those languages can have different words within a series of characters which are not separated by spaces. FTS requires that search terms be separated by whitespace (spaces, tabs, line feeds, etc.).

Thanks!

Brendan

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