C
Charles Akben-Marchand
(Posted here in full at Matt's suggestion)
I was trying to find something in my Mechanic events and it took me a few tries (I eventually found what I was looking for), and I find generally that I struggle to successfully use the Event search and filters and just rely on finding events based on the known date/time of the events I'm looking for.
After a bit of testing, I've come up with some observations and some suggestions, listed below. I've tried to keep my suggestions within the realm of implementability. :)
  1. Regardless of whether any changes are made to the search/filter functionality itself to make it easier to use, it would be very helpful to have some more clear guidance/documentation to help me understand what I can and can't search (including when using the search box on the filter panels). For example, the search box could have placeholder text that reads "Search event topics, order IDs, customer ID, product SKU, and more", and maybe on the right of the Events search bar you could have a [?] button that links directly to https://learn.mechanic.dev/app/events (where there would be more technical details of the abilities and limitations of the search and filter features).
  2. Can you make it so the search boxes on the event filters are case-insensitive? E.g. I have a task named "Populate Discount Codes..." but it doesn't show up when I search the Task filter for "discount"
  3. Can you make it so the Topic filter search can find terms in the middle of the topic (e.g. treat the slashes as spaces)? E.g. I have a topic "user/foo_bar/submitted" that doesn't show up when I type some or all of "foo_bar" (and adding * to either end of a Topic search appears to display results but just displays the same as if there were no search)
  4. I had typed "Discount" into the main search box, revealing no results, and without removing it, the Task and Topic filter dropdowns behaved unexpectedly. If I click in the search box within the filter dropdown and try to scroll the list that appears, the list immediately goes away. I didn't clue in to the fact that I still had "Discount" in the main search box. Maybe if there are no results the event filter buttons that aren't applied can grey out or become inactive, to cue the user to broaden their other search parameters?
  5. When I use the main search box (not the box within the filter selector) to search for "user", it brings up results for "mechanic/user/trigger", but not "user/foo_bar/submitted"
  6. The main search box will return a topic match for "locksmith/sessions/ping" if I type in the full term or if I type in "locksmith", but not if I type "locksmit", "locksmith/", "locksmith/sess", "locksmith/sessions", "locksmith/sessions/", or "locksmith/sessions/p"
  7. Searching the main search box does not appear to search Task titles. E.g. Events using the "Populate Discount Codes..." task don't show up when I search for the partial or full Task name.
  8. What fields does the search use anyway? I seem to recall it wasn't possible to search events for customer/order email/names/ids, but upon testing I'm getting results many of these things (though not necessarily consistent results for each). Maybe when it wasn't working for me before it's because I was looking for info that was in the event data but not an actual order, or maybe you've updated it? Or maybe I happen to have these terms populated in the event logs now but I didn't the last time I tried.