15 March 2010, 11:41

I have managed to set up a Mahara with Moodle integration install and all seems to be working correctly with one exception. Whenever I search for something I always get the message "No search results found :(" This happens when I search for people or groups.

 I have this same problem in both Mahara 1.2.2 and 1.2.3. I am able to see all the people and groups if I leave the search term empty.

I am using the default search and as far as I can tell have followed the install procedure correctly. Is there something that I could have missed that builds an index for the search to go against?

The server is running Suse Linux with MySql as the database. 

15 March 2010, 13:38

Hello Matthew,

The portfolio search often does not work. You may want to disable it and use the tag search / tag cloud instead (Admin -> Configure Site -> Site options) asking your learners to tag their artefacts. They then will be able to view them on the "My Tags" page that is accessible via the sidebar under "Tags".

I encounter problems searching for people when they have entered a preferred name that differs from either their first or last name. I advise our students to search only for their first names because they often use those in the preferred name field as well. If you check http://mahara.org/interaction/forum/topic.php?id=1533 you will see that Richard did his magic programming and there is a solution for 1.3.

All the best

Kristina

15 March 2010, 13:50

That's very strange!  Is there anything in your error log ? I know when search was first written there were problems with mysql, but surely they must have been resolved by now.

You're haven't configured Mahara to use the solr search plugin have you? That's extremely out of date and almost certainly doesn't work anymore :(

16 March 2010, 11:14

Thank you both for the quick responses and suggestions.

At the moment I am testing with a small group of accounts and have not yet created portfolios.

I have done further experimenting and have discovered that the problem seems to lie with uppercase letters!

If I have a profile with:

First Name: Matthew

Last Name: Cannings

Display Name: brum

I am able to search for brum but not Matthew or mat or Cannings

If I change them to

First Name: matthew

Last Name: cannings

Display Name: Brum

I get results searching for Mat or mat or matthew but nothing for brum

So the problem seems to be if I enter profile data in mixed or uppercase it is not being searched properly but if I enter it in lowercase then I can search against it with no problems

Update: I have changed the firstname, lastname and preferredname rows in the usr table from utf8_bin to utf8_general_ci collation and this seems to have resolved this problem