BUG - search does not include subcategories

hi SolidSystem,

I guess there a small bug. I have tested using your demo installation.

1.) I have activated category selection in the CP search module.
2.) I have choosen some properties and as category selected the "parent" cateogry Food - no results.
3.) I have changed the category selection to subcategory Food->Appetizer - now sonme results appear.
4.) On the result screen (I got at the step 3) I click on "Food" - now I have see results related to category Food.

The same problem appears when creating menu item and selecting parent category.

Native Joomla always selects all articles from all subcategories when filtering on parent category. So the CP search module and menu item should behave the same way.

Could you please fix this problem?

I have very hierachical categories structure and my users would be very confused when getting no results and forcing them to know in which subcategory exactly they have to expect their results.

thanks a lot in advance.

That's exactly how Custom Properties is supposed to behave (if you restrict the search scope to a given category, CP will search only articles belonging to that category, and not inside other categories)

We will evaluate the possibility of implementing the search into child categories in future versions of CP, although it will likely cause a performance hit.

hi Andrea,

sorry but I have to disagree. CP should not change the behaviour of the Joomla core rules. Especially that users will notice the change when searching in categories with CP and without CP (nativ). CP is for me like additional filtering criteria - but not the change of the categories/subcategories behaviour.

I am not asking to search in any other category but to correctly scan the hierarchy of categories.

I can imagine that implementing a query to select from subcategories introduce a bit complexity and has impact on the query performance - but I don't think it is really a desired behaviour

Please take a look at following argumentation.

1.) If the CP module does not look into subcategories then it should be consequent and not show parent categories as an option in the "category selection" field. This will only confuse the user.

Please imagine typical case. Subcategories are for grouping categories. When administrator decide to create for example subcategories like:
Programming Language->PHP
Programming Language->Java
Programming Language->Javascript ...

for sure he will never assign any article to the top category "Language" but mainly to any of the leaf subcategories. If the user hit an search request and selecting as category "Language" what does he expect to be searched? Just abstract empty "Language" category or all languages?

2.) As said before I want to offer the my users CP as an additional filtering mechanism. How can I expect the users will know - when selecting parent category from native menu option - I will get all subcategories but when using the nice search box with radio buttons (CP module) - I should "not touch the parent categories otherwise I will get 0 results" ? Not nice. Eventually I could add a note to the user - if you want to search in the entire Food category - please select all Food-subcategories - not nice too.

Maybe till now all clients of your extension had a quite flat structure of categories (like 1 or 2 levels) and never have noticed this inconsistency with native Joomla.

Please consider my argumentation. In my opinion it is quite important. You could maybe add this as an option (search in subcategories - yes / no).

I would really like to start with this extension but I am afraid I will confuse my users with this problem.

thanks a lot in advance

best regards
Martin

PS.1. As I can see in your demo in the module configuration (module instance for searching in entire "parent Food") you overcame this limitation yourself by selecting the parent category and all subcategories in the module configuration. It would be some kind of workaround but of course requires the administrator to be careful when adding new subcategories - he has to adjust all related modules and menu items as well.