cens/ohmageServer — Issue #192: document/search
Author: jojenki
Created: 2012-02-03 22:26:34+00:00
State: open

We need to add search functionality for documents.

Use-case:
This is to be used by admins to search through all documents to find specific information. This is not meant to act as a replacement for document/read. It is intended to allow admins to query the system for specific documents as opposed to document/read which is intended to serve information about documents that pertain to a certain entity.

A specific use case would be an admin that needs to find all documents that were uploaded that contain the extension .mp3. This could be used to locate songs that students had uploaded. The search criteria would be entity-agnostic and would give the admin the ability to search over all documents regardless of user or class.

Another specific use case would be an admin that needs to find all documents that were uploaded by a certain person. If this person had been suspected of uploading offending information, it would be easy for an admin to quickly find all documents uploaded by this user.

Implementation:
This API should contain parameters for all metadata associated with a document, username of the user that created it, name to check if the name contains a certain substring, or description to check if the description contains a certain substring.

While it may be useful to search the contents of the files, we do not currently have an efficient indexing system to perform this type of analysis or a use-case to warrant creating one. Therefore, this will omitted from the initial implementation.