Search seems to have bugs
Posted by cryptonomicon at
The search function seems buggy
example
Go to model source->electronic components->passive components->capacitors->aluminium capacitors hit search
we would like say to find all the 100 uF capacitors. We know you have them because we can see ALP20A1018BB in the list.
OK so lets filter for all 100 uF capacitors, so select under capacitance 100 uF and hit Update Results.
It says you don't have any..........
Anyway if you play around with it somethings work - some don't, cant quite figure if strings are working and numbers not, or whether its something else. Probably faster just to rewrite that whole bunch of code - search queries are a pain to debug - by the time you have worked it out you may as well have rewritten it.
As a suggestion it would be nice to have a more general search like your main website does. If I go to one of your international sites - for example the pommie one
http://uk.rs-online.com/
and type "100 uF capacitor" without quotes into the search box I get nice results
Anyway good luck - I think the idea is great - tighter integration into design spark would be better - Be nice to just type "100 uF cap" into design spark and it goes away to your web site, pulls up a list including prices and availability - lets me choose one with the PCB schematic and 3D model and off we go.
But still I like the idea - Not sure though whether there are enough small fry like me to make money for you though. Perhaps some big guys will use it as well if it gets nice and polished.
Replies
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Hi cryptonomicon,
Thank you for your feedback. Just performed your journey for 100uF caps and you are absolutely right, there is a bug in the attribute filtering. This must be to do with the miu (micro) character as filtering for 100nF does give valid results. I reported that and we will get it fixed.
The more general search you refer to is a very difficult thing to implement, the solutiuon on the rs-online website costs millions of pounds so virtually impossible to get it on DesignSpark any time soon. Searching through such vast amount of data is tricky! One way around it is to indeed find a component via rs-online and then take a chance via ModelSource MPN search but you will quickly find that the parts you need don't have library files. Our ambition is of course to constantly increase the library coverage, but this takes time.Anyway good luck - I think the idea is great - tighter integration into design spark would be better - Be nice to just type "100 uF cap" into design spark and it goes away to your web site, pulls up a list including prices and availability - lets me choose one with the PCB schematic and 3D model and off we go.
Thank you and I am glad you like ModelSource. We have tighter integration in plans, while as I explained above the description search is beyond our reach for now, pricing and availability definitely can and will be added. 3D models are also now separated in second user interface but will become visible side by side with PCB library files.
Finally we appreciate every user of our free resources, in fact we prefer to have many smaller users than few big ones. The more users we get the more feedback we are able to collect which in turns helps us to make our free solutions even better. So thanks again for taking your time to report the bug in capacitance attribute filtering and for the feedback in general.
Best regards
Mike