Lack of interest Search system requires keywords or user

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Rasmus Vind

Rasmus Vind

Well-known member
I am building my own content type which has a lot of attributes. Attributes which I am not comfortable with swarming my node view page with, but would rather put in the dedicated search page. Unfortunately I have come to find a severe limitation of the search page. The search adapters is a genius idea and it satisfies everything I need and will need, but I have a problem with the controller XenForo_ControllerPublic_Search. It requires that the user either enters a username or keywords. This is the same no matter the content type you search in as it's in the controller and not the search_handler_class for each of XenForo's own content types.
I can understand that the "Search Everything" has this requirement as it's totally up to you, but for my own content type, why must I be limited by this? I have 10-20 different ways to reduce the result set of my content type. The user may not wish to reduce by username or keywords.

I would suggest that this line:
PHP: 
if ($input['keywords'] === '' && empty($constraints['user']))
        {
            // must have keyword or user constraint
            return $this->responseError(new XenForo_Phrase('please_specify_search_query_or_name_of_member'));
        }
Is only applied for "Search Everything" and a similar error is returned by each of XenForo's own search_handler_class types (if you really want it there).

This suggestion is easy to implement and gives addon developers more power while the existing functionality remains completely the same.
 
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I have been experimenting with commenting out the above line. Everything worked except for "Search Again". I have narrowed the issue down to XenForo_Route_Prefix_Search where the buildLink function looks as follows:
PHP: 
    public function buildLink($originalPrefix, $outputPrefix, $action, $extension, $data, array &$extraParams)
    {
        // add items to allow search to be repeated; query is checked to ensure user can view
        if ($data && !empty($data['search_query']))
        {
            if (!empty($data['search_query'])) { $extraParams['q'] = $data['search_query']; }
            if (!empty($data['search_type'])) { $extraParams['t'] = $data['search_type']; }
            if (!empty($data['search_order'])) { $extraParams['o'] = $data['search_order']; }
            if (!empty($data['search_grouping'])) { $extraParams['g'] = $data['search_grouping']; }
            if (!empty($data['search_constraints'])) { $extraParams['c'] = json_decode($data['search_constraints'], true); }
        }

        return XenForo_Link::buildBasicLinkWithIntegerParam($outputPrefix, $action, $extension, $data, 'search_id');
    }

This means that the "Search Again" link will only work if the user entered a search query. Another limitation.
 
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