Auto-Complete for Search Box

[gbaz]

Good suggestion. The question is what we auto-complete to? I suppose package names, possibly tags...

(we could also have jump-to-package on exact match. but we'd want to not force that on users, but only make it optional -- need good ui for that)

[hvr]

fwiw, we have autocomplete at http://matrix.hackage.haskell.org/ ; that requires to seed the webbrowser with a JSON array of all package names

[saevarb]

I think the auto-complete at http://matrix.hackage.haskell.org/ is very nice.

Is it desirable to avoid seeding the browser with all the package names? Looking at the API call that's being made, https://matrix.hackage.haskell.org/api/v1.0.0/package/list/?count=100000, it seems to be limiting it to a 100.000 packages. The returned response is roughly 600 kilobytes of JSON. In the grand scheme of things, it's not a lot(and probably made a lot less by compression), but I think it can still be avoided.

We could simply send an API call upon typing a character, which would then limit the response to packages starting with those characters. In order to avoid hitting the API too much, we could just cache the responses so that if I type a, then delete it, and type a again, we don't need to hit the API again.

[gbaz]

I think that would put more load on the server and also decease overall responsiveness. We can cache and share the file, if it is fixed, and only generate it rarely on the server. (and also only fetch it periodically for the client -- imho it is ok if auto-completion lags the db for up to 24 hours or more).

[hvr]

fwiw, that's actually the old faked API; the new API (which isn't live yet) just sends a [Text] array; and it's very cheap server-side to send it (and it's also very CDN friendly, as it uses Etags based on hasing the data); however, the important bit is to send that list lazily; as it does take a bit of processing time in the browser to decode and process that large array. IOW, there's no need to introduce a 24h delay; it's perfectly doable to keep it fresh!