Customize the filtering algorithm

[project707]

The listview filter proceeds to do a character by character filter, which is only useful in very limited number of cases. It doesn't work if all products have reg or tm symbols in them or have long names.

Self-edited rant about lack of low-level documentation here... uneccessary

[toddparker]

This is a good feature request...would you mind adding it to the feature request wiki page?

[project707]

I actually closed it because I felt I had been a bit too harsh about the
documentation thing. We're actually using jquery mobile to build a mobile
site for/at a major company that everybody knows, and in those kinds of
cases as you probably know there is little design/functionality flexibility,
so we have all been experiencing a bit of frustration at the lack of more
detailed documentation. I feel there must be a lot of functionality that
could be hooked into, and styling that can be overriden that we're missing.

I will go ahead and make it into a feature request, and I'll be nice about
it :)

Thanks,
jason

On Fri, Jun 24, 2011 at 12:29 PM, toddparker <
reply@reply.github.com>wrote:

This is a good feature request...would you mind adding it to the feature
request wiki page?

Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub:
#1921 (comment)

[toddparker]

Thanks Jason, I appreciate it! We're a tiny team working on this so features like this aren't as fleshed out right now as we'd all like. If you do figure out a clean way to make this extensible, please submit a patch.

[project707]

So I'm not really familiar with git and submitting patches (been stuck in the svn world), but I have a simple working method to skip any non-alphanumeric characters within the "listview" filter extension that can be enabled by adding data-filter-skipspecial="true" to your listview ul.

It defaults to false:
$.mobile.listview.prototype.options.filterSkipspecial = false;

but if set true does a replace on both input value and "itemtext" with the following:
.replace(/[^a-zA-Z 0-9]+/g,'').replace(/\s+/g,' ');

which only compares like strings containing alphanumeric characters, and without excess whitespace as might be added by removing an ampersand or another character that might stand alone. The character itself can still be typed in without effect, as the compared input string is still filtered.

It might be nice to give developers the option to specify an array of allowed or filtered characters, but I think this would suit our needs for now.

[project707]

I have added this feature to a branch and submitted a pull request.

Sorry for the branch naming convention. I was following https://gist.github.com/726275 instructions and being a gitN00b just followed along exactly.

[toddparker]

Pull request here:
https://github.com/project707/jquery-mobile/commit/994f69ce85f40ed54f9ba5ca5d41f198fd4b077a

My thought on this is that instead of creating a special case for this one situation, we'd be better off having a pluggable solution that lets' people use whatever parsing logic they want. I can see the current approach ballooning as people want to add scoping and more complex searching logic.

[project707]

This has been solved by adding a callback allowing one to intercept the filter term:
#2216

Unfortunately another unrelated issue (#2092) that can't easily be solved using this hook was closed instead. Can we keep that one open and close the appropriate one (this)?

[toddparker]

Thanks, closing this, will reopen #2092