Overriding search method to make a column searchable seems to remove my action buttons

[scottjs]

Bug report

I want to make a column searchable in the CRUD panel but not show it in the list of columns. I found some notes here that appears to allow me to use $this->crud->addColumn() to append additional columns to the search.

However, when I do this my action buttons seem to get replaced with this custom column and I'm not sure why.

What I did:

public function search()
{
    $this->crud->addColumn([
        'name' => 'primary_contact_id',
        'label' => 'Primary Contact',
        'type' => 'select',
        'entity' => 'primary',
        'attribute' => 'firstname'
    ]);

    return parent::search();
}

What I expected to happen:

No visible changes to the column view but allows the search field to also search for the primary contact name.

What happened:

The action buttons were removed and replaced with my custom column instead.

Before:

After:

What I've already tried to fix it:

Overriding the entire search method to see if it's an ordering issue, but I'm not able to work out how this works internally to try other things.

Backpack, Laravel, PHP, DB version:

Backpack: 3.4
Laravel: 5.6
PHP: 7.1.20

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[tswonke]

Yes, same to me.

Just looking for the same: Using the search in a table field that is not declared as a column.

[jsvini]

You could add a custom search logic in a column to include other columns in the search, without overriding the search method:

$this->crud->addColumn( [
	'name'        => 'my_field',
	'label'       => 'My visible column',
	'type'        => 'text',
	'searchLogic' => function ( $query, $column, $searchTerm ) {
		$query->orWhere( $column['name'], 'like', '%' . $searchTerm . '%' );
		// add other fields
		$query->orWhere( 'my_hidden_field', 'like', '%' . $searchTerm . '%' );
	}
] );

[scottjs]

You could add a custom search logic in a column to include other columns in the search, without overriding the search method:

$this->crud->addColumn( [
	'name'        => 'my_field',
	'label'       => 'My visible column',
	'type'        => 'text',
	'searchLogic' => function ( $query, $column, $searchTerm ) {
		$query->orWhere( $column['name'], 'like', '%' . $searchTerm . '%' );
		// add other fields
		$query->orWhere( 'my_hidden_field', 'like', '%' . $searchTerm . '%' );
	}
] );

Thanks for the reply :) Yeah that's what I ended up doing in the end and is actually working fairly well. I just thought it was weird in this case to attach unrelated search logic to a random field just to modify the search query.

Overriding the search method seemed like a cleaner solution and the fact that the action buttons disappeared definitely seems a bit strange.

Thanks,
Scott.

[tswonke]

Yeah, this is a very good "quick&dirty" solution :)

[tabacitu]

@jsvini that’s a nice hack, thank you :-) I think we should provide an official solution to this, since it’s a pretty common scenario.

Solution A

The most intuitive solution would probably be to allow developers to add “invisible” columns, that get searched, but aren’t visible in the list view. We could:

• have a “visible” attribute on the columns, which is true by default;
• use getVisibleColumns() instead of getColumns() in the list view, but keep using getColumns() in search;

So it would be as easy as:

$this->crud->addColumn([
   'name' => 'description', // The db column name
   'label' => “Description", // Table column heading
   'visible' => false, // show or hide the column from the list view
]);

Solution B

A solution with less impact on existing features would be to have something like addColumnToSearch(), which would just add it to another property on the $crud, say… $additionalSearchColumns, which would get merged with the other columns in applySearchTerm() alone. So you’d use it like:

$this->crud->addColumnToSearch([
   'name' => 'description', // The db column name
   'label' => “Description", // Table column heading
]);

Maybe a better name would be addSearchableAttribute() or… I don’t know.

---

What do you guys think? Any better solutions?

[tswonke]

IMO we shouldn't use any kind of fake column here. I think this is misleading. It never shows up, or do I miss something? Why do we need "label" for this?

I tend to something like your addSearchableAttribute() (or a similar name), but without using our columns array.

Maybe something like this with 3 ways to use:

// simple string
$this->crud->addSearchableAttribute('column_name');

// array of simple strings
$this->crud->addSearchableAttribute(['column_name1', 'column_name2']);

// closure for special searches
$this->crud->addSearchableAttribute(function() {...});

[tabacitu]

@tswonke you make a good point... It’s not actually a column, it’s just an attribute you make searchable.

[tabacitu]

@tswonke , @scottjs @jsvini I've inadvertently pushed a solution for this yesterday, in the 3.5 release (also #1706). I don't think this is the perfect solution we were discussing above, but it is a solution. You can now do:

$this->crud->addColumn([
   'name' => 'description',
   'visibleInTable' => false, 
   'visibleInModal' => false,
   'visibleInExport' => false,
   'visibleInShow' => false,
]);

and it will be searchable, but show up NOWHERE in the ListEntries nor Show operation.

I'll close the issue for now, since we do have a soluton. Let me know if you think it's not a particularly good one, and we'll create a PR to add addSearchableAttribute() like @tswonke proposed - that was definitely cleaner. And we'll move the conversation there.

Cheers!