Add full text search

Currently there's no way to perform a full-text search.

It should be relatively straightforward to do this for a set of fields that commonly support this; such as title and description.

• Proposals
  • Introduce a new operator
  • Add a new operator and support token lists
  • Overload the in operator**
  • Support multiple attributes (with sane defaults)
  • Add a new function
• Requirements

Proposals

Introduce a new operator

For example:

• title contains "Roadmap improvements"
• title =~ "Roadmap improvements"

Pros

• Easy

Cons

• Verbose and laborious if the user has to repeat the statement multiple times to search >1 field
  • title contains "Roadmap improvements" and description contains "Roadmap improvements"
  • (Though until OR is supported this is unlikely anyway)

Add a new operator and support token lists

For example:

• (title, description) like "Roadmap improvements"

Pros

Cons

Overload the in operator**

For example:

• "Roadmap improvements" in (title, description)

Pros

• Supports multiple fields out of the box
• Concise

Cons

• Flips the usual attribute operator value pattern, adding complexity to the language.
• Requires a parser update, which is risky and difficult.

Support multiple attributes (with sane defaults)

For example:

• search = "Roadmap Improvements" and searchIn = (title, description)

Pros

• Closest to most API implementations

Cons

• First token with two words
• More verbose and complex. Requires more knowledge on the part of the user.

Add a new function

For example:

• search = "Roadmap Improvements"
• search = searchIn("Roadmap Improvements", (title, description))

Pros

• Relatively concise
• Complexity increases with requirements for more control
• Components already exist (statement parsing, = operator, functions)

Cons

• Requires completing gitlab-query-language#34 and/or expanding values within functions

Requirements

• Implement support for escaped strings also, as titles and descriptions are likely to include quotation marks that may be interpreted as string terminators.