Author: About the triple-post: this is an interesting question. Sometimes things get posted multiple times, sometimes it doesn't happen. You are not the first person to encounter this problem, but I never see it when I post something myself. So, did you just write your post once and hit the "Post Message" button once?
About the instrumentation: You can already do this, kind of. There is a full-text index on all text fields together. So, the search mechanism searches the title, composer, and the additional text field all at once for any keywords you enter. The problem with words like violin is a data problem: sometimes they are abbreviated, and sometimes they aren't. To get around this problem, you can do multiple searches (one for "violin" and another one for "vln", for example).
I guess one could do several things to address this:
- to avoid typos and different spellings, use several drop-down boxes for the instrumentation so that one can enter them only in one well-defined way. Seems a bit too complicated to me, not nice to use, and the contents of the drop-down boxes will never cover all instruments one might want.
- create a list of synonyms (e. g., violin=vln) and internally expand the text query; for example, if you enter "violin piano", the search engine could consult the list of synonyms and automatically construct a query like "(vln or violin) and piano" out of your "violin piano" query. Maybe that's better because it hides complexity from the user and handles the existing data as they are.
- maybe you have still other ideas?
Rainer
About the instrumentation: You can already do this, kind of. There is a full-text index on all text fields together. So, the search mechanism searches the title, composer, and the additional text field all at once for any keywords you enter. The problem with words like violin is a data problem: sometimes they are abbreviated, and sometimes they aren't. To get around this problem, you can do multiple searches (one for "violin" and another one for "vln", for example).
I guess one could do several things to address this:
- to avoid typos and different spellings, use several drop-down boxes for the instrumentation so that one can enter them only in one well-defined way. Seems a bit too complicated to me, not nice to use, and the contents of the drop-down boxes will never cover all instruments one might want.
- create a list of synonyms (e. g., violin=vln) and internally expand the text query; for example, if you enter "violin piano", the search engine could consult the list of synonyms and automatically construct a query like "(vln or violin) and piano" out of your "violin piano" query. Maybe that's better because it hides complexity from the user and handles the existing data as they are.
- maybe you have still other ideas?
Rainer