Include non GitLab users in the commits search by author dropdown

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• Close this issue

The following discussion from !28509 (merged) should be addressed:

• @sming-gitlab started a discussion: (+1 comment)

  Opportunity for Improvement 1: Dropdown doesn't include Non GitLab users

  The author dropdown only displays GitLab users of the project. Likewise in the search feature, you can only search users of the project. But you may notice some of the commits are non-gitlab users, these users will not appear in the dropdown. This might be something we want to address in a future iteration.

  So here is a non GitLab user (it points to an email address when hovering on the username)

  

  Here is a Gitlab user

  

  Potential Solution

  Unfortunately our current endpoint, it only returns GitLab users of the project. It doesn't include non-Gitlab users. This is something we probably want to address in a separate ticket.

  @robotmay suggested one possible solution:

  We could potentially let them just search plain text

  ---

  The endpoint that @robotmay created does support commit filtering by non GitLab users. Currently, we don't have an endpoint that returns these users to us, so we probably need to add support for this if we want this for a future iteration.

  

• Another possible solution

@pedroms I think we can add a “Search for {query}” option at the bottom of the dropdown if the search query doesn't match any GitLab user.