How to perform a WHERE LIKE "%string%" search equivalent for JSON in lawnchair

Question

When the website is loaded I want to do one ajax call to a PHP script that returns a json array of data (max 200 pieces), and store it in lawnchair. See http://brian.io/lawnchair/

I preload the data to not have to wait every time for PHP/MySQL to answer the ajax request. I want an autocomplete field that returns values while typing. The result comes from lawnchair so no more calls are made to the MySQL server.

So consider we have this dataset:

• Apple, http://image.com/url/apple.jpg, $0,25
• Pear, http://image.com/url/pear.jpg, $0,34
• Pineapple, http://image.com/url/pineapple.jpg, $0,55

When the user types "p", all of the above needs to be shown. When the user types "app" only Apple and Pineapple are shown.

Thus I need to search through the dataset with a MySQL WHERE LIKE "%string%" equivalent code. I have looked on Brian's website website, but I see only exact match searches possible with query? See: http://brian.io/lawnchair/plugins/

Thanks in advance for any hint in the right direction.

Answer 1

A quick glance at the (relatively poor) documentation suggests, that the following would work:

var hits = [],
    searchExpr = RegExp.escape(searchValue);

fruitStorage.where('/' + searchExpr + '/i.test(record.name)', function (record) {
    hits.push(record);
});

// now do something with hits

Without looking deeper into the source code, this might work as well.

var hits = [],
    searchExpr = new RegExp(RegExp.escape(searchValue), "i");

fruitStorage.where(
    function (record) { return searchExpr.test(record.name); }, 
    function (record) { hits.push(record); }
);

BTW, RegExp.escape() is taken from this answer.