So I've jumped into the Lasso 9 pool... Discovering things here and there.

TL;DR: "Word begins with" searches in Lasso 8 has turned to "field begins
with" in Lasso 9. Thats bad but seems to be easily fixed.


With the Lasso 8 FMS connector, the action_statement for an inline
searching a FileMaker database can look like this:
/fmi/xml/FMPXMLRESULT.xml?-db=database&-lay=list&-lop=and¬es.op=bw¬es=joh&-max=1&-skip=0&-find

The default behavior for searching an FM text field is "word begins with".
This will return all records that have a word that begins with "joh"
ANYWHERE in the field.


With Lasso 9 the action_statement instead looks like this:
-db=database&-lay=list&-q1=notes&-q1.value=%3D%3Djoh%2A&-max=1&-skip=0&-findquery=&-query=(q1)

First of all it uses a compound query, a fairly new thing in the FMS XML
API. That's fine. It opens some interesting possibilities for complex
queries.

But the interesting part here is q1.value which decoded is ==joh*
In FileMaker lingo this means "Find exact field contents 'joh' and then a
wildcard". In effect, this makes Filemaker only find records where the
ENTIRE FIELD begins with "joh". That's an important difference from Lasso
8, and I would say that it's a defect.
It will NOT find records that have a word that begins with "joh" anywhere
in the field. In other words, this is exactly how the "bw" operator will
work for a text field in for example MySQL.

So to find a word deep inside a text field we have to switch to "contains"
search with -op='cn'. But then we will find occurrences also in the middle
of words, which we might not want. Also we can't take advantage of the
index, which is word based in FileMaker.


Changing the query to -q1.value=joh makes the search behave just as in
Lasso 8.


I'd like to know what the reason is for this changed behavior. I see it as
a bug, but maybe it's intentional to make FM work like MySQL. In that case
I'd say it's a bad idea, since we are making big efforts to make MySQL
searches behave like FM... For example with the fulltext tag
http://www.lassosoft.com/tagswap/detail/fulltext, or by using fulltext
indexes.

It could also be a pure mistake, and in that case I hope we can see this
fixed.

I'm throwing this out here for discussion, but will rhino it as well.

--
Mvh
Johan S=F6lve
____________________________________
Montania System AB
Halmstad Stockholm
http://www.montania.se

Johan S=F6lve
Mobil +46 709-51 55 70
johan@montania.se

Kristinebergsv=E4gen 17, S-302 41 Halmstad, Sweden
Telefon +46 35-136800 | Fax +46 35-136801
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