Improve Filter/Search Page

[emmahodcroft]

This is a mega-issue designed to help us consider how we'd like to improve filtering/searching. This should help us tackle some of the below, which include previous issues (marked where appropriate), including:

• How can we support allowing multiple search options per field? (Ex: show sequences from 2 countries)
• How can we support inverse searching? (Ex: Show all sequences except those from USA)
• How can we support 'blank' searching (or not) (Ex: Show all sequences that have no country - or, show all sequences that have any country)

The recent PR which adds the currently applied searches to the top of the page will make these easier to support as it'll be much clearer to see what's currently applied (and clear individually), but we should still think about implementation.

One idea is to implement something like Excel, where tick marks show what's applied (and multiple items can be ticked) - 'blank' included. (Also important is a way to select all and deselect all)

I believe all of this should be supported on the LAPIS/SILO side, but am less clear on 'everything except blanks' and 'inverse searching'. I guess with the 'Excel-style' execution it may not matter as Maybe @chaoran-chen or @Taepper could comment there?

Sub issues:

• Allow multiple filters in one 'category' to be applied at once #2467
• Allow 'negative' (exclusionary) filtering #2468
• search: better handle blank values #1978

[chaoran-chen]

Regarding LAPIS/SILO:

How can we support inverse searching?

At the moment, one would have to send a query that filters for all other available values. We have, however, just started working on implementing advanced searches, which would directly allow this.

How can we support 'blank' searching (or not)

I'm not sure but I'll discuss this at the latest next Wednesday with the others.

[theosanderson]

How can we support 'blank' searching (or not)

I think this is already supported in LAPIS, e.g. so this is just a matter of website code

[chaoran-chen]

For some types it works but it seems that it is not supporting dates: example. I'm not entirely certain at the moment whether it is a bug or a not-implemented feature (but I think it's the latter). (@Taepper and @fengelniederhammer probably know more?)

[Taepper]

Hmm, SILO supports filtering for Negations, And, Or, NOf, etc. and therefore can cover all of the above, so this is possible (also for dates, albeit with a different query than is necessary for Strings). So LAPIS should be able to map this correctly

[fhennig]

Looks quite useful to me!

I think for the UI the excel-way of doing things also looks good, making it possible to select multiple values in the drop down.