EDIT

Applied in changeset taxeditor|839b92539242127ea71873c516b4af61b269e110.

Works fine. I added a utility method to remove all non-word characters of the pattern because search string with characters like '(' or multiple '*' caused the same problem.

Patrick Plitzner wrote:

Works fine. I added a utility method to remove all non-word characters of the pattern because search string with characters like '(' or multiple '*' caused the same problem.

Sorry but doing such a change it should be reviewed!! First of all, it does not work. I created a FeatureTree called "Test Feature(Tree). Searching for "Test Feature(" did throw:

login : admin
editor version : 5.5.0.201901311248
server : test.e-taxonomy.eu (edit-test) / rem_conf_am
schema version : 5.0.0.0.20180514
os : Windows Server 2012 R2 6.3 amd64
java : 1.8.0_121
java.util.regex.PatternSyntaxException: Unclosed group near index 19
(?i)Test Feature(.*
                   ^
    at java.util.regex.Pattern.error(Pattern.java:1955)
    at java.util.regex.Pattern.accept(Pattern.java:1813)
    at java.util.regex.Pattern.group0(Pattern.java:2908)
    at java.util.regex.Pattern.sequence(Pattern.java:2051)
    at java.util.regex.Pattern.expr(Pattern.java:1996)
    at java.util.regex.Pattern.compile(Pattern.java:1696)
    at java.util.regex.Pattern.<init>(Pattern.java:1351)
    at java.util.regex.Pattern.compile(Pattern.java:1028)
    at java.util.regex.Pattern.matches(Pattern.java:1133)
    at java.lang.String.matches(String.java:2121)
    at eu.etaxonomy.taxeditor.ui.dialog.selection.FeatureTreeSelectionDialog.callService(FeatureTreeSelectionDialog.java:67)
    at eu.etaxonomy.taxeditor.ui.dialog.selection.AbstractFilteredCdmResourceSelectionDialog.search(AbstractFilteredCdmResourceSelectionDialog.java:577)
    at eu.etaxonomy.taxeditor.ui.dialog.selection.SearchDialog$2.modifyText(SearchDialog.java:178)
    at org.eclipse.swt.widgets.TypedListener.handleEvent(TypedListener.java:180)
    at org.eclipse.swt.widgets.EventTable.sendEvent(EventTable.java:84)
    at org.eclipse.swt.widgets.Display.sendEvent(Display.java:4418)
    at org.eclipse.swt.widgets.Widget.sendEvent(Widget.java:1079)
    at org.eclipse.swt.widgets.Widget.sendEvent(Widget.java:1103)

Also it is not the correct way to simply remove non-word characters as this may filter those entries which DO have such characters, and we do not limit labels to word characters.

Slightly better would be to remove them by ".".

But the best solution is to mask all RegEx syntax characters correctly. E.g. "(" -> "\(" . I am quite sure there must be libraries/ java functionality doing this, havn't checked.

Now the non-word characters are replaced by '.'

I now had a closer look to how this is all used. And there are principal problems why this can not work.

The code is in AbstractFilteredCdmResourceSelectionDialog and manipulates the search string before calling callService(String) . The problem is that this method has not javadoc contract how the method should be used and how the search string should look like.
So currently in subclasses the method is sometimes used to simply pass the search string to a service method call (e.g. ClassificationSelectionDialog) while in other classes it is used for java regular expressions (e.g. FeatureTreeSelectionDialog).

If we allow such different handling we can not do any search type specific handling of the search string in AbstractFilteredCdmResourceSelectionDialog. E.g. replacing some characters by "." works for java regex but does not work for service layer hiberate/sql calls. Some counts for the last solution using Pattern.quote() or similar.

If an adaptation of the search string is needed it NEEDS to take place in the subclasses, not in the base class. And if java regex is used CdmUtils.quoteRegExWithWildcard(String) is probably the correct transformation method.

BUT: we should discuss if it should not be required to always run service method calls. Isn't this the idea of the dialogs that they work in the same way and that they all retrieve data from DB according to the filter string and do NOT usually load all data first and filter them afterwards. If according service method calls do not exist we should create them.
Handling all dialogs the same way makes it much easier to maintain the code and avoids problems as the one that we encountered here.

Katja, Patrick, could you please discuss how this can be achieved.

I tested all changed selection dialogs and experienced no exceptions.

There is a related issue. When creating a new Feature Tree in FeatureTree selection dialog "New Feature Tree" the created feature tree does not set the protected title cache correctly. Is is set to false and therefore the titleCache is not stored correctly. FeatureTree should be created same way as in FeatureTree editor "New".

Andreas Müller wrote:

There is a related issue. When creating a new Feature Tree in FeatureTree selection dialog "New Feature Tree" the created feature tree does not set the protected title cache correctly. Is is set to false and therefore the titleCache is not stored correctly. FeatureTree should be created same way as in FeatureTree editor "New".

This is fixed. The titleCache is now created with protected=true

Patrick Plitzner wrote:

Andreas Müller wrote:

Also the New Group dialog does not allow to enter a group name. The dialog is empty.
Also in New User dialog it is not possible to enter a username. Textfield is disabled.

Are these on purpose? If yes we should remove the "New Group" and "New User" buttons.

I would say that we remove "New group" and "New user" because those entities should be created and edited only in the corresponding bulk editor.

Agreed. Can you change this?

Already done ;)

Also the related issue seem to be fixed all. I think we can close this ticket.