[Improvement] Improve E.cash search for group chats

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Platform - version: All

Problem

Search is frequently how I find a given chat. There are two main problems I currently have with it:

1. It doesn’t work well for group chats. For example I can’t type in Lauren Andrew in order to find my group chat with Lauren and Andrew.
2. It looks for the whole string that I type in to be a match, rather than looking at whether there is a matching user for each word. For example, when I search Alex Revelli nothing comes up because she she is listed as Alexandra Revelli. I would think that she would still show up because the second word in my search, Revelli is a match to her user.

Why is this important?

Easy search makes Expensify.cash an easier, lighter experience.

Solution

Update search to work as follows:

• split search string on spaces
• return all exact and partial matches to each string
• order results by most recent message (meaning the most recent message posted in the chat)

Upwork Job link: https://www.upwork.com/jobs/~01ccd27d2ef43f2d7f

[tugbadogan]

Hi @NicMendonca, I created a pull request on top of the most recent UI changes. I fixed this issue and removed redundant regex patterns from the code.

[tugbadogan]

Hi @NicMendonca,

I’ve already apply through Upwork. My Upwork name is Fadime Tugba Oge.

Also a note, we’re waiting for other UI changes before we can hire for this job.

No problem, thanks for letting me know. I’m happy to work on this issue later.