2025-01-27 Cross App SIG Meeting notes

Date

Jan 27, 2025

Homework

Please review UXPROD-4545: Standardised search wildcards across apps: * ? Draft

Housekeeping

Convener and notes: Tara

Recording: https://recordings.openlibraryfoundation.org/folio/app-interaction-group-mondays/2025-01-27T12:00/

Topics: 2025 Meeting and Topic Calendar

Discussion topics

Time	Item	Presenter	Notes

Time	Item	Presenter	Notes
5 min	Announcements	Tara	Next Meeting (February 5th): Hidden Fields Any other topics?
	Wildcard Working Time	Tara	We will be focusing our efforts on clarifying UXPROD-4545: Standardised search wildcards across apps: * ? Draft Search Brainstorm: Jira Dashboard: https://folio-org.atlassian.net/jira/dashboards/10490 What other filters would find relevant issues? A filter just searching open “wildcard” issues?

Notes

This meeting we focused on clarifying and improving standardized wildcard search across FOLIO apps. This turned out to be quite a bit more complex than our initial estimate.

We discovered several issues with the current ticket examples - the use cases contained errors where question mark searches wouldn't actually find the expected results. The group corrected these, establishing that question mark replaces a single character while asterisk represents zero or more characters.

The discussion revealed deeper complications around search behavior. We grappled with what "should not default to left anchored and truncated" actually means in practice, particularly regarding how searches tokenize words and handle punctuation. Owen raised important questions about multilingual behavior and what constitutes a "word" across different languages and scripts.

We examined the scope challenge - we compiled a list of all the different search fields across FOLIO, raising questions about whether wildcard support must be universal or can vary by search type. The group recognized that some searches (like UUIDs or ISBNs) may not need truncation capabilities.

Laura suggested focusing on a narrower, more achievable goal: identifying places where wildcard characters other than asterisk and question mark are currently used, and standardizing just the characters themselves rather than trying to harmonize all search behaviors. This approach would address the immediate pain point of users having to remember different wildcard characters across apps.

Owen noted this could still create implementation challenges but agreed it provides a clearer starting point for development discussions.

Action items

Investigate current wildcard implementations across apps to identify where non-standard characters are used, and make sure tickets have been filed to address these.

Come up with a plan to document current wildcard search behavior across FOLIO