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files/search results seem to be too inclusive
My application uses files/search (with mode=filename) to find specific marker files with our dropbox structure in order to identify the correct folder to work with.
These marker files have uniq...
Greg-DB
Dropbox Community Moderator
Dropbox Community ModeratorThanks! We'll check the logs in your ticket and look into this.
Greg-DBDropbox Community Moderator
Dropbox Community ModeratorI don't have an update on this yet, but this is currently open with engineering. I'll follow up here once I have some news for you.
- Greg-DBThis should be fixed now. Please let us know if you're still seeing any issues.
I think I have fallen foul of this as well. I'm pretty sure up until recently (presumably 3 weeks ago) searching for the filename "ABC.pdf" only returned an exact match. But now it's also matching "ABC blah blah.pdf" which I don't want.
I contacted support directly using my business account contact, they confirmed that some users were experiencing the same issue and escalated the issue to their API team.
After a week or so the issue was resolved and now the search behaviour is back to how it used to be for me. I have no idea what they did.
Not knowing if the issue would be resolved, I re-wrote my code to expect multiple results and also changed the search query I was using to find the files.My particular use-case is searching for marker files to identify individual folders. The markers are all very similar - 15 alphanumeric chars - and all end in the same extension ".sfdb" and there are around 20K of them in our Dropbox.
The new search was returning pretty much any .sfdb file and in most cases the exact match wasn't in the first or even second result set.
The thing I found to give the most consistant results was to not include the file extension in the search query. ie. search for "abcd00000001234" not "abcd00000001234.sfdb".
Removing the extension meant I received just a handful of results with the exact match consistantly being in the first 3 results. So I used that technique with a small limit on the result set (5 or 10) and then parsed the results to find the exact match.
That worked well for me with my particular search requirements. The same might not be true for you.
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