MAF Favourites Alerts

Kate Percival

I believe only WLUK uses FavouriteAlerts in MAF (favourites/actions/alerts) but I wondered a couple of things: In ManageFavouriteSearchAction, there is a method checkForRecentResults that makes sure the search being saved (either as an alert or an RSS feed) actually returns results. It does this by creating a 'clone' of the SearchState, appending a prism-clipdate to the query and running the search. However it then creates a SearchResultState from the SearchResult and sets it on the 'cloned' search. This has the effect of actually attaching it the original SearchState. My questions are: 1. Why do we need to create (and, more importantly, set) the SearchResultState since we can get the document count from the SearchResult? 2. Perhaps more importantly, is anyone aware that the clone() method on SearchState doesn't clone the SearchResultStates, but sets them to be the original result states? Finally, does anyone else use the favourites/actions/alerts classes?

Enrique Molinari

I can only answer your last question. My undestanding is that only WLUK use this. And also this code was deprecated. New Apps were asked to not use this.

Gerry King

The rationale behind why we have checkForRecentResults() was as a 'solution' that fails to address the problem of users creating searches via a list of Subject Areas that have no current results

. For normal alerts we do not have to worry however for RSS feeds we provide an RSS icon that links to an RSS Xml file of results. If there are no results there is no RSS XML and users get a 404 Not Found error. Enter the half-baked if (ALERT_TYPE_RSS.equals(alertType)) { checkForRecentResults(request, model); } which runs the search with the date restriction moved 3 months back in the past. Even if there aren't any we still let users create them. OK so it reduces the number of 404s. Now the problem happens infrequently so Support folks have forgotten why the problem occurs, testers still report it as a bug and the company wastes more time and money. At the time we developed the original MAF based on WLUK we did suggest to the WLUK product owner that we should create a 'boilerplate' file detailing the search terms which would be FTPed to the RSS landing strip just as quickly as a list of old results. Like most solutions proposed by Application Developers it was kicked into the long grass of 'maybe sometime in the future'. Like the ******** WLUK breadcrumb it remains unchanged over 3 years latter quietly exuding a bad smell. Unlike the WLUK breadcrumb that costs them an additional 2 app servers and bites them on the bum whenever they want new functionality e.g UI & Search this particular piece of ordure hasn't raised it's ugly head till now. > does anyone else use the favourites/actions/alerts classes? Don't get me started on that inspired piece of WLUK functionality. You might as well have mentioned PAS path branding if you wanted to wind me up LOL! AFAIK only some of the childern of WLUK use this. Bring on the censorious emails....