15 July 2010, 10:10

Dear all,

I've installed the latest Mahara release (1.2.5) and I am Website admin.

Now, if I go to the "search users" input field and type my own lastname, the

search doesn't find anyhing. Same for any other first-, last-, or usernames.

Is there anything wrong with the search? Do I have to configure something.

Thanks

   Juergen

15 July 2010, 18:07

Hi Joergen, unfortunately there are a few things wrong with the search!

But some of the problems you're having are known: for example, you never find yourself in search results, usernames are not searched, and anyone who has set a display name can't be found under their real name.

In 1.3 the last two of those will be addressed by two new site-wide options to (a) force users to be searchable by their real names even if they have a display name set, and (b) to allow username searches.

However, if you're using 1.2, you can't find other users by their first or last names, and those users don't have display name set, then it's a new bug we don't know about yet.

16 July 2010, 3:26

Dear Richard,

Thanks for your reply!

my test users do not have set any display name.

What I could find out yesterday though is that the user search

works on my local workstation install of Mahara but not on the installation in the web cluster although it's the same SVN synced source code... do you think it could have to do with the MySQL version (s.t. the queries don't work)?

cheers

   Juergen

16 July 2010, 6:09

Found the problem: The server's MySQL database was set to a default COLLATE of utf8_bin which is case sensitive...thus all searches were case sensitive...

I'm going to change the default  COLLATE and re-install the DB. That should do the job.

Thanks again for your help

Juergen

22 July 2010, 6:45

Hi all,

I'm using 1.2.5 on a Debian 5.0 LAMP server. I'm experiencing some strange behaviour from the search engine, but it isn't related to searches being case-sensitive as Juergen reports (although my database is also set to utf8_bin collation). Juergen, did you solve your problem changing the DB collation?

Some examples from my search results with test users:

• - An empty search correctly returns the list of all users.
• - A search by first or last name of an existing test user (different from the one conducting the search) returns no results. All test users have empty Display Names. This is so even if the name is repeated in the user's "Introduction".
• - A search for a word that is present in several users' profiles (in the "Introduction" field) returns some results, but not all possible results are found. For example, searching for "professor" returns only some of the profiles that contain that word in the "Introduction" field. I couldn't find a correlation between the profile appearing in the search results and any user setting (being a friend of the searching user, being marked as public or not...).

Any suggestions on what I can do to narrow down this problem? Seems like something is going wrong with the query to the DB, but I can't go much further than that.

Thanks,

David