Finding a user given their (exact) display name

Question

For my app, I allow people to "register" themselves on my site by typing in their Stack Overflow (etc) name. Now it does allow you to use your ID if you know it, but I find that typing in usernames is much more user-friendly.

In the back end, if someone enters a name, I do a query to /users?filter=<name> and look at the results. So if you enter my name, "codeka", or "Jon Skeet" or something else which is unique on the site it comes back with a single response and I just use that directly. If you type in something like "John", there's 1,287 users that come back for /users?filter=John.

The problem is that if your name on the site is exactly "John", then you might find that you're way down the list somewhere. Rather than requiring users to page through the list to find themselves, I'd like to have some way to specify that "filter" returns exact matches only. So if you entered /users?filter=John&exact=true (say) then only users whose names are exactly "John" would come back.

That way, I could still display the list as I do, but then I could make it so that exact matches appear at the top.

Does that seem reasonable?

Answer 1

Actually, I think I figured out a way to do this. If you specify the following:

/users?filter=john&sort=name&min=john&max=JOHN

That is, sort by name with "min" and "max" both set to "john" then it returns only those people whose name is exactly John. I wonder whether this efficient for the backend to process? It seems to respond pretty quickly, which is a good sign.

One interesting point is that it seems to be case-sensitive:

/users?filter=john&sort=name&min=john&max=john

Only returns the 24 users whose name is "john" (lower-case "J") but with max=JOHN then I get 224 users whose name is "John" or "john".

With such a large number of exact matches, though, I wonder what the best way to present that is? Just say "there are 224 users with the name 'John', here's the first 30 and if you can't find yourself you'll have to enter your user ID manually"? Maybe this is a corner-case and I'm thinking about it too much :)

Answer 2

UPDATE: min/max on users by name is now case insensitive resulting in a viable 'exact match'. e.g. min=john&max=john see should min/max for alpha-numeric cases be case-insensitive?

---

the min/max solution that codeka presents seems to work great. While it does not guarantee accurate results, it does drastically reduce network traffic.

I simply check again when I get the results back and filter out non-matches client side, e.g.

Soapi.RouteFactory(site.api_endpoint, apiKey)
    .Users(
    {
        min: username.toLowerCase(),
        max: username.toUpperCase(),
        sort: Soapi.Domain.UserSort.name
    })
    .getPagedResponse(function(data)
    {
        $.each(data.items, function(ignored, user)
        {
            if (user.display_name.toUpperCase() == username.toUpperCase())
            {

                // set the site so we can render links and logo.
                // this can be refactored down to a literal with needed fields only
                user.on_site = site;

http://api.stackoverflow.com/0.9/users?sort=name&min=joey&max=JOEY&order=desc