Cannot change Project on an issue if target project name is a substring of other project names

Temporary workaround for this is to type "Project name (project nid)", so for that issue: Devel (3236).

The basic problem is that EntityReference selection plugins let you configure an operator for the autocomplete search to be either "contains" or "starts with". They all try to do a single query, with the right operator, and the only sorting options are to use other fields, not "relevancy".

The way to get exact matches to show up first in the list (what you'd expect) would be to be doing 2 queries each time. The 1st would query for an exact match, the 2nd would do whatever you configured it to do (starts with vs. contains). In theory, the first query should be relatively fast, but it's hard to know, especially on a site like d.o where {node} has 1.1 million records. If we were to go down this path, it'd be wise to run some EXPLAIN queries to make sure things don't get out of hand.

Given that, there are two basic approaches to fixing this:

A) Try to get a patch upstream into EntityReference itself to do this double query business (I haven't even searched the EntityReference queue yet to see if this has already been proposed).

B) Write our own custom selection plugin that does what we want.

We already have a "Project behavior" plugin (so instead of having to manually select all the bundles you care about, you can just say: "reference any node from any type that's configured to be a project" or "any node type that's configured to be an issue", etc). That's in project/plugins/entityreference_selection/Project_SelectionHandler_ProjectBehavior.class.php if anyone wants to take a look. We'd have to have that class implement getReferencableEntities() to do the direct match query first, then invoke the parent's copy of that function and merge the results.

I can work on this if necessary, but this seems like an issue that just about anyone familiar with EntityReference could fix, and perhaps the best fix is upstream in EntityReference itself. Step 0 should probably be searching if this is already being proposed/discussed in ER.

Thanks,
-Derek

Okay, just spent a little while looking at the ER queue, and the closest I could find was this:

#1841924: Improving Autocomplete Widget Results Popup through better sorting.

The proposed solution there won't work for us at all.

It'd be great to get feedback from any of the ER maintainers here (Amitaibu, damz, bojanz or amateescu) . If someone sees any of them on IRC, please ping them. ;)

Cheers,
-Derek

@jhodgdon - #5: Yes, we probably want a separate issue in the ER queue to get their attention on this. Either that, or just move this issue there.

@tvn - #6: I'm not sure that's really the problem (although that'd be another way to help this -- searching for matches for the project machine_name field, not just the title). As I understand it, the problem is that if your field is configured to search using "contains" not "starts with", the project name/title you're searching for is short, and lots of other projects have that same string in their title/name, there's nothing to put exact matches first in the list of autocomplete options returned by the callback. So I think the "short project name" stuff is a bit of a red-herring, and the real issue is about project names that contain commonly-used strings...

It'd be great to get feedback from any of the ER maintainers here (Amitaibu, damz, bojanz or amateescu) . If someone sees any of them on IRC, please ping them. ;)

I left them messages with Druplicon, let's see if they get them soon.

It has been suggested by @jhodgdon already, but autocomplete widgets work best in general if you sort the matches alphabetically.

Could that solve the problem on Drupal.org?

amateescu asked for a dev site to work on this, http://projectname-drupal.redesign.devdrupal.org/ will be ready in ~ 1.5 hours.

Thanks for the dev site. I made the changes there so everyone can go in and test it. Also posted a patch here: #2188111: Update the 'field_project' field with better matching and selection settings.

@jhodgdon, there's an update function included in the patch :)

Deployed.