Return whole list instead of empty array if no search term is set

I’m using fuse.js with the includeMatches option to easily highlight matches. The problem is that the usage of includeMatches changes the structure of the list because it has to includes the matches in a fitting manner:

// with includeMatches (the structure changed to include the matches)
[
  {
    "item": {
      "title": "Old Man's War",
      "author": {
        "firstName": "John",
        "lastName": "Scalzi"
      }
    },
    "matches": [
      {
        "indices": [
          [
            0,
            12
          ]
        ],
        "value": "Old Man's War",
        "key": "title",
        "arrayIndex": 0
      }
    ]
  }
]

// without includeMatches
[
  {
    "title": "Old Man's War",
    "author": {
      "firstName": "John",
      "lastName": "Scalzi"
    }
  }
]

My problem is: I want to output the whole list if no search term is set. But fuse.js returns (for logical reasons) an empty array. Instead of this I need the whole list with the matches structure. Otherwise I need to treat it different.

Is it possible to return the whole list with empty matches if no search term is set?

[d3vr]

This can be useful. Here is an example: suppose you’re showing a list of contacts and you want to use a search bar to filter it. If the search term is empty display all the list, otherwise display only the filtered results.

Is there any way to achieve this?

[acnebs]

@krisk I think the use-case here for most people is that they are using Fuse for “filtering” behaviour rather than just searching, in that you have some list of items which are displayed to the user, the user enters a search term, and now you have a smaller list of items. When it comes to rendering these results to your UI, you don’t want to have two different rendering patterns for the different cases – you just want to have a single for loop that renders either every item or some subset of the items. This is much easier if Fuse has an option to spit out a “formatted” version of the data when no search term is specified, as it allows better separation of your data logic from your view logic.