Case-insensitive search using Contains

[danmarshall]

Hello, looking at the page https://idl.uw.edu/mosaic/inputs/ I tried to do a name search via the inputs:

I was expecting a search for gar to include the first result A Jesus Garcia. It does work for Gar.
I realize this is a feature (not a bug) but was hoping the clause

search({ label: "Name", as: query, from: "athletes", column: "name", type: "contains" })

might allow to express this capability, without having to add an all-lowercased duplicate column copy name_lowercase.

[jheer]

Thanks @danmarshall. Many of the underlying DuckDB string methods that we call (contains, starts_with, ends_with) for these selections are case-sensitive. So we will need to add an option (at the level of the search widget and maybe also the generated selection clause) that causes Mosaic to wrap both the column and query string in lower(...) calls to enforce case insensitivity.

In the meantime, explicitly transforming the text to lowercase is the way to go.

[declann]

Checking this noticed theres an inconsistency in what gets selected in the table and what gets shown in the search dropdown,

e.g. search abba => 5 results in dropdown (case insensitive) and 2 in table (case sensitive)

Screencast.from.2025-01-24.20-47-40.webm

[jheer]

Checking this noticed theres an inconsistency in what gets selected in the table and what gets shown in the search dropdown

Yep, the autocomplete list is currently managed purely by whatever browser you're using. Ultimately we would like to have our own autocomplete widget here to get proper control. I'd be very happy to review a PR if someone has the time to implement this in the inputs package.