Especially when models become big and you have quite some identifiers, the standard search widget (e.g. when adding identifiers to a widget, or finding the identifier to be used as identifier for side panel in a page) can be tricky to work with.
One of the problems is that the match is based on exact match of your search-expression with a part of the identifier name. Especially if you have some identifiers that share a same start, it might become more difficult to find them, partially because of the second problem
The second problem I have is that the width of the window of the of the matching identifiers is not too wide. Over the years, I started to give my identifiers relative describing names. Combined with for example the fact I might use additional prefixes to group more identifiers together, the names can become relatively long. This means for sure I will not see the indices of the matching identifiers anymore, but sometimes not even the last characters (on the other hand, why use super cryptic short names for your identifiers if you can have names that make it directly clear what data they represent)
It would be very nice if besides the current default behavior of searching based on returning matches based on occurrence of the exact search key in the identifier name, you could also have an ‘advanced’ way of searching, namely by using fuzzy searching. This way, you search for an identifier like
pAwesomeIdentifierHoldingDemandData
based on a search strings like
- “Awme Demand”
- “demand awesome”
- or any type of fuzzy matching combination.
I have changed my way of working both in my editor and in the terminal to be based on fuzzy matching (using the tool FZF) and it makes finding things a lot easier if you know a couple of items in the name, not necesarily in the right order.
It could be a setting in the developer version of AIMMS to indicate that during development you want to keep using the old way of searching, or using a fuzzy matching.