Adding a more fuzzy search filter

[sgtwinters]

Like discussed in #15 hereby a suggestion to add a more fuzzy search filter to the CollectionOperator. It takes both the like and not like operators into account. It acts upon search filters with two asterisks (beginning and end).

[johannesschobel]

Hey man, thank you very much for the PR. Unfortunately, I am away the next days, so it may take some time to review the code.. hope this is ok..

Cheers

[sgtwinters]

No problem, as soon as you got the time !

[johannesschobel]

I am just curious.. this looks kind of "black magic" here.. ;) Is it possible to make this "more readable"? Can we simplify both IF/ELSE branches in order to make this more accessible? What do you think?

[sgtwinters]

Sorry for my slow reply, I was out as well. It indeed is a bit of black magic (encountered that too :P), but I kind-of followed the current implementation there: composing a rule (in this case a 2nd one) which will be evaluated. If we would like to improve I would say we should get rid of this method completely. I will try to look a bit further this weekend, but before I start: do you have suggestion which way to go?

[johannesschobel]

Actually i really like the way to filter based on specific fields. I think, that is quite handy and i would not like to remove it.

Maybe we can just add few more comments in order to make it better readable / understandable..

[sgtwinters]

I agree that filter based on fields is perfect! I meant to say that filtering using the evals could change, but honestly, if we can clear things up a bit I'm happy too :D. I plan to use this package in a not-really-demanding environment, I think it suits such a case. In a high traffic case I would rather make use of Eloquent to perform first filtering and sorting (i.e. do more specific queries instead of grabbing full collections and filter those). I think that would be a more scalable approach (but will off course need a lot of work in this package) :). What do you think?

[johannesschobel]

I am completely fine with the current approach I initially chose for this package. I also agree, that you might want to do it differently in a more complex scenario. However, for smaller projects this is quite nice as it really removes a lot of work from the developer. ;)

[sgtwinters]

Indeed! I will add comments to clear things up and than do a PR ok?

[johannesschobel]

you can add it to this PR.. just add more commits in order to enhance the currently open PR ;)