Convert search activity to use URLs not titles

[mhutti1]

Code Improvement

Convert the search activity to use URLs rather than titles to reference articles internally and in the saved recent search database.

[mhutti1]

This will require a database migration.

[Aditya-Sood]

@mhutti1 the recentSearch database has a zimID field which seems to contain dash separated hexadecimals. What does it refer to exactly? I couldn't figure that out

[mhutti1]

zimID is the id of the ZIM file every file should have a unique id. zimName doesn't change between content upgrades.

[Aditya-Sood]

So this issue is aimed at replacing the zim ID everywhere with the corresponding URL and then subsequently using that URL for identifying the zim file?

[mhutti1]

No its about the search activity not the content management activity.

[stale]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be now be reviewed manually. Thank you for your contributions.

[stale]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be now be reviewed manually. Thank you for your contributions.

[Aditya-Sood]

Discussion about integrating a possible fix for this issue is taking place at kiwix-build/#354

[macgills]

@Aditya-Sood what is the state of this? Why does it need a kiwix-lib update?

 ZimContentProvider.searchSuggestions(query, 200);
            String suggestion;
            String suggestionUrl;
            List<String> alreadyAdded = new ArrayList<>();
            while ((suggestion = ZimContentProvider.getNextSuggestion()) != null) {
              suggestionUrl = ZimContentProvider.getPageUrlFromTitle(suggestion);

it seems like we already get all the data we need? Title/url of the suggestion and ZimContentProvider has the ZimId.
I feel like I am missing something here. This screen is also a prime candidate for unidirectional data flow and updating with a recyclerview

[Aditya-Sood]

There's an implementation of getNextSuggestion() in kiwix-lib which, along with a title, also returns the corresponding url (link to function). Using this implementation will help avoid the cost of an additional call at:

suggestionUrl = ZimContentProvider.getPageUrlFromTitle(suggestion);

That is what I am looking at until now. But I need to go through SearchActivity again because I think @mhutti1 is hinting at a more comprehensive overhaul of the activity.

[macgills]

Given the late hour of the milestone and seeing as how this is a code improvement that won't affect UX I would say this can be moved on to 3.1 or collected in a 3.0.X patch.

[Aditya-Sood]

Before merging, the kiwix-android PR #1537 needs to be updated to use the kiwix-lib version number with the kiwix-lib PR #289 merged to master