[ome-users] Substring search?

[Graham Klyne]

I was showing OME to a new potential user yesterday, and a question came 
up that required searching for the occurrence of a substring *within* a 
string value in a new Semantic Type.

So if we have entries with fields containing:
  1.  "foo,fie,foe,fum"
  2.  "foo,foe,fum"
  3.  "fie,fum"
a search for "fie" would return the entries 1 and 3.

With a little experimentation, I found that I could use a wildcard to 
match leading substrings (e.g. searching for "foo*" would return 1 and 2 
above) but the searching for "*fie*" didn't work.

My question is:  is there a feature I'm overlooking that does this in 
the UI?  (I'm fairly sure this could be done at the database level using 
postgres regexp matching.)

(This use of substring matching would be an interim "fix" until a more 
structured approach to organizing the data could be adopted, so I'm not 
suggesting here that it should be regarded as a priority feature request.)

#g

-- 
Graham Klyne
Image Bioinformatics Research Group (http://www.bioimage.org/)
Department of Zoology, University of Oxford
South Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3PS, UK
E-mail: <Graham.Klyne at zoo.ox.ac.uk>
Direct phone: +44-(0)1865-281991
Departmental fax: +44-(0)1865-310447