Dynamic advanced search library? - asp.net-mvc-3

I'm getting ready to cook up an MVC search page that will allow the user to build their own query. They might search for something by title, then add an "AND" criteria of objects posted before a certain date, "OR" objects with a certain tag. Before I plow into the code, is there a library or something that already gives functionality like this?

here have a look at dynamic predicate builder

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Subquery in JQuery QueryBuilder

I am going to use the JQuery Query Builder plugin in my project. I want to know how query will generate for relational table.
For example, I have two tables user and user_emails. I want to filter those users which have an email address. To get this result, I have to use subquery on user_emails table. Has that been possible by using this plugin? In the demo, I have not found this case.
Your question is vague. Do you want to build conditions in the jQuery-QueryBuilder for "All users with emails"? You also want the jQuery-QueryBuilder to look and return something like the following?
After you clarify the community can point you in the right direction.

Customize Data Studio reports with different filters for different users

I have many end users for my reports. Some of them want to look at all website data, some just section A, some section B, etc. For my own sanity and not having to create the same report over and over with different filters, I'm wondering if there's either:
A way to provide a link to a report where the link tells data studio what filter to apply to the report
A way to filter the report based on the user who's logging in.
I have the impression that neither of these is possible, and it seems like people are reluctant to have one dashboard that they have to proactively filter for their section (I'm still going to try that). But I'm hoping that there's perhaps something I didn't know about.
This is possible using Custom bookmark links (doc). The Drill down table example (doc) shows how you can create a table with records linking to a second page of the dashboard with different filters. You could use this to create filter pre-sets for different users groups.
This is currently not possible.

Is there a way to sort a content query by the value of a field programmatically?

I'm working on a portal based on Orchard CMS. We're using Orchard to manage the "normal" content of the site, as well as to model what's essentially data for a small application embedded in it.
We figured that doing it that way is "recommended" for working in Orchard, and that it would save us duplicating a bunch of effort in features that Orchard already provides, mainly generating a good enough admin UI. This is also why we're using fields wherever possible.
However, for said application, the client wants to be able to display the data in the regular UI in a garden-variety datagrid that can be filtered, sorted, and paged.
I first tried to implement this by cobbling together a page with a bunch of form elements for the filtering, above a projection with filters bound to query string parameters. However, I ran into the following issues with this approach:
Filters for numeric fields crash when the value is missing - as would be pretty common to indicate that the given field shouldn't be considered when filtering. (This I could achieve by changing the implementation in the Orchard source, which would however make upgrading trickier later. I'd prefer to keep anything I haven't written untouched.)
It seems the sort order can only be defined in the administration UI, it doesn't seem to support tokens to allow for the field to sort by to be changed when querying.
So I decided to dump that approach and switched to trying to do this with just MVC controllers that access data using IContentQuery. However, there I found out that:
I have no clue how, if at all, it's possible to sort the query based on field values.
Or, for that matter, how / if I can filter.
I did take a look at the code of Orchard.Projections, however, how it handles sorting is pretty inscrutable to me, and there doesn't seem to be a straightforward way to change the sort order for just one query either.
So, is there any way to achieve what I need here with the rest of the setup (which isn't little) unchanged, or am I in a trap here, and I'll have to move every single property I wish to use for sorting / filtering into a content part and code the admin UI myself? (Or do something ludicrous, like create one query for every sortable property and direction.)
EDIT: Another thought I had was having my custom content part duplicate the fields that are displayed in the datagrids into Hibernate-backed properties accessible to query code, and whenever the content item is updated, copy values from these fields into the properties before saving. However, again, I'm not sure if this is feasible, and how I would be able to modify a content item just before it's saved on update.
Right so I have actually done a similar thing here to you. I ended up going down both approaches, creating some custom filters for projections so I could manage filters on the frontend. It turned out pretty cool but in the end projections lacked the raw querying power I needed (I needed to filter and sort based on joins to aggregated tables which I think I decided I didn't know how I could do that in projections, or if its nature of query building would allow it). I then decided to move all my data into a record so I could query and filter it. This felt like the right way to go about it, since if I was building a UI to filter records it made sense those records should be defined in code. However, I was sorting on users where each site had different registration data associated to users and (I think the following is a terrible affliction many Orchard devs suffer from) I wanted to build a reusable, modular system so I wouldn't have to change anything, ever!
Didn't really work out quite like I hoped, but to eventually answer the question in your title: yes, you can query fields. Orchard projections builds an index that it uses for querying fields. You can access these in HQL, get the ids of the content items, then call getmany to get them all. I did this several years ago, and I cant remember much but I do remember having a distinctly unenjoyable time with it haha. So after you have an nhibernate session you can write your hql
select distinct civr.Id
from Orchard.ContentManagement.Records.ContentItemVersionRecord civr
join civ.ContentItemRecord cir
join ci.FieldIndexPartRecord fipr
join fipr.StringFieldIndexRecord sfir
This just shows you how to join to the field indexes. There are a few, for each different data type. This is the string one I'm joining here. They are all basically the same, with a PropertyName and value field. Hql allows you to add conditions to your join so we can use that to join with the relevant field index records. If you have a part called Group attached directly to your content type then it would be like this:
join fipr.StringFieldIndexRecord sfir
with sfir.PropertyName = 'MyContentType.Group.'
where sfir.Value = 'HR'
If your field is attached to a part, replace MyContentType with the name of your part. Hql is pretty awesome, can learn more here: https://docs.jboss.org/hibernate/orm/3.3/reference/en/html/queryhql.html But I dunno, it gave me a headache haha. At least HQL has documentation though, unlike Orchard's query layer. Also can always fall back to pure SQL when HQL wont do what you want, there is an option to write SQL queries from the NHibernate session.
Your other option is to index your content types with lucene (easy if you are using fields) then filter and search by that. I quite liked using that, although sometimes indexes are corrupted, or need to be rebuilt etc. So I've found it dangerous to rely on it for something that populates pages regularly.
And pretty much whatever you do, one query to filter and sort, then another query to getmany on the contentmanager to get the content items is what you should accept is the way to go. Good luck!
You can use indexing and the Orchard Search API for this. Sebastien demoed something similar to what you're trying to achieve at Orchard Harvest recently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7v5qSR4g7E0

Handling Relational Data Input

When creating an MVC application with a "Create" view for a particular entity and I want to relate it to another entity I could use a dynamic drop down menu.
However when the possible items is larger than 10 (for example) the drop down does not seem to offer the best user experience.
What is the recommended way to handle the input of a relationship between entities? A textbox that validates against the possible entities?
A textbox that validates against the possible entities?
That is pretty much the answer. The general idea would be to have a controller method that takes a query string and checks against the list of valid entities and returns the entities that match the query. The user can then choose from that filtered list.
You don't have to build it from scratch if you don't want to. Take a look at something like https://github.com/twitter/typeahead.js. There is also https://select2.github.io. However, there are probably lots of choices for that type of control.

Search in default_collection minus a specific collection

In our GSA index of 500K documents half of the documents are coming from an internal bug tracking system.
We have been hearing some power users complain about results from the bug tracking system pushing down other useful results from many other sources.
We discussed about using result biasing to lower the importance of bug tracking documents but I am not very keen on this approach as I believe we should let GSA do its magic and decide on the relevancy of the results.
Instead what I want to provide users as an option is a UI (checkbox for each collection) where they can pick what collections they want to perform the search.
My non-default collections does not include everything that is under the default_collection. So when user checks each and every checkbox they may think that that is everything in the index while it is not.
Because of this I want the checkboxes to behave as exclude rather than include (i,e. check to exclude this collection).
Finally my question: Is there a way to search in the default collection but filter out results that belong to a specific collection (bug tracking collection).
When you want to use multiple collections you do &site=col1|col2|col3..
What I am after is something like &site=default_collection-col1 (that's a minus in between).
Is there a way to do this?
Any alternative approaches to this problem?
Personally, I would rethink the design of your collections and build more modular collections that you can include. That way as you mentioned you can include OR queries in your site include.
http://www.google.com/support/enterprise/static/gsa/docs/admin/70/gsa_doc_set/xml_reference/request_format.html#1076953
A less ideal but more specific solution to your problem is going to be do an exclude by URL in your search query, be aware this can appear in results query search box and looks ugly, but this can be fixed using a simple XSLT change.
To exclude results for a specific site (http://www.google.com/support/enterprise/static/gsa/docs/admin/70/gsa_doc_set/xml_reference/request_format.html#1076964) I would use this sparingly and opt for better design of the collections.
By far the best way to do this is in your collection config. Just create a new collection that has the same include pattern as your default collection and add the pattern from your bug tracking collection as an exclude pattern.
There's no way to do what you're asking purely using query parameters unless you list out every individual collection using the '|' except the one you want and then you're likely to run in to URL length issues.
Update your frontend to exclude the url patterns mentioned for the bugtracking collection.
check this url on your box
http://yourGSAEnterpriseCcontroller:8000/EnterpriseController/serve_remove.html

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