Search improvements

[juuso-vaadin]

Issues

Search is triggered too eagerly

Typing in G (delay) RID will trigger the search after entering the first letter.
Search isn't triggered again before the first query is finished which results the UI and URL not being in sync with the displayed data.
This can be fixed by running the search again or refreshing the page. Typing in the field should immediately terminate any ongoing queries and start a new one. Eagerness could be tweaked to bit more delayed.

vaadin-directory-search.mov

Improvement ideas

Returning the results is annoyingly slow

Best fix would be to make the search query faster.

Secondary improvement could be to make the waiting time more bearable by introducing better loading state. The loading bar at the top doesn't appear associated with the contents of the web page. Skeleton loaders would make the experience more jumpy and also function as indicator for loading the data.

Results are not prioritized by relevance

There could be some rough scoring based on if match is found in component title or description.
Components could also have metadata for core components they expand. For example searching for "vaadin-grid" would ideally return any components that add features to Vaadin Grid component.

Empty view when nothing is found

There should be a dedicated "Nothing found" message that ideally helps the user make better search queries.
Currently the toolbar number of matches doesn't update resulting the UI and data being out of sync.

More advanced improvements could offer user with way of recovering. Check for misspelling of keywords, ask to check if other filters (Version selection) is active or suggest list of common searches.

[samie]

We did some optimization for search, and while it still could be faster it should be better already. I'm keeping this issue open as discussion about further search improvements.

Notable changes:

• search only after 3 or more letters are entered
• client-side caching
• serverside query caching