Does anyone know if there is a way to use a wildcard in a data table search. For example, I have students that are creating a video game review app and they want to bring up all games that have Metroid in the Title column. Attached is a link to a simple example program I made to emulate their process. Ideally we would be able to append a “*” to the text string and get back all records that have that string involved. Right now it looks like we can only get exact matches. I attempted to use SQL style searches, ? and * as possible wildcard searches to no avail.
If you are talking about filtering with special conditions, regex would be my go to. I’m a bit unsure of what you are trying to do. I haven’t heard of SQL searches but my assumption is that you want a system to filter out stuff that begins with a string, and also be able to filter out stuff that contains a string.
Pattern: “ABC”
Contain: “Hello ABC World”
vs. Starts with: “ABC Hello World”
var array = ['ABC Hello World', 'Hello ABC World']
var matchpattern1 = new RegExp('^ABC') //starts with
var matchpattern2 = new RegExp('ABC') //contains
function getFiltered(pattern) {
return array.filter(function(element){
return element.match(pattern)
})
}
console.log(getFiltered(matchpattern1)) // ["ABC Hello World"]
console.log(getFiltered(matchpattern2)) // ["ABC Hello World", "Hello ABC World"]
You can see it here
I also included a version where it just had the wild card that you put at the end, I’m hoping that is what you were asking for.
This works great for Arrays, and we can try work with this solution to do a search to get all the items in a table then go through them using this. However, it seems to be clunky way to do it, as now the program has to go through potentially a giant array to get the information out, when it could have done it in the Table search system.
In AppLab, not the Animation version, you can have data tables that work like SQL. The RegEx did not work in that instance as you don’t get the array of items back until after you have done the search. I think there is a way to do it like in SQL, however this I don’t believe this is exactly an SQL database. Please correct me if I am wrong.
Jim
Got it working with the array.filter. Still think there should be a way to filter on the getRecords method. Here is a link to my updated project with filtering included. The table only has three Metroid games in it now, so search for Metroid.