Blank or Wildcard Search for Course by Instructor Fails

On 3.8.0 I can replicate what Beth sees with a BLANK search.

When I try to do a wildcard search I get an internal server error for Course Name or Course Number. A wildcard search for Instructor returns no results (but does not give me an internal server error).

The top two commits on this branch should resolve this issue: user/sandbergja/lp1968754_instructor_search

It also includes a handful of tests to hopefully prevent some regressions in this feature.

In testing the patches. A search of just a wild card in the instructor field does return all results, but if I add the wildcard character to a string (d*) to search for courses with instructors that start with 'd', no results are returned.

The course name and course number searches using 'contains' seem to truncate the search. For example, if the course is Art History, with a course number Art 100, a search for 'ar' returns results. But a search for an instructor named 'Davis', is not retrieved using a search of 'da'.

Removing pullrequest as per testing comment #3

I amended my second commit to handle instructor wildcard characters. Please note: the instructor wildcard only will work at the end of the string.

This is because it's implemented as a tsquery prefix wildcard search in postgres. If we wanted more fully featured wildcard searching for instructors, while retaining the ability to search names in any order (firstname lastname vs. lastname, firstname), we'd have to do some more extensive re-thinking, which I'd suggest is outside the scope of the original report.

Testing notes:

-- I logged in to a BR1 workstation
-- I added users (Victor Hart, Jan Lindsey Copeland) to three courses assigning the "Instructor" role in each case
-- I searched courses by Instructor and found the following:

  -- Adding an asterisk (*) to the end of any search string correctly returns the expected courses.
  -- Including a space in the search term, for example, when searching the instructor’s full name (e.g. Victor Hart), resulted in an internal server error.

Oooh, good catch, Beth. Pushed a fix to the same branch (user/sandbergja/lp1968754_instructor_search)

Jane, thanks for this fix. I can now search by instructor using a search string including one space (e.g. first name and last name). However, if the search includes multiple spaces (e.g. two-word first name and last name), the internal server error still appears.

Thanks for your careful testing, Beth! It's getting there. :-D I force-pushed a fix to that same branch. It's now the top three commits on user/sandbergja/lp1968754_instructor_search