Will autocomplete suggestions for Biblical Events, Cultural Concepts, and Preaching Themes, and Topics be restored in a future release (albeit there were no suggestions for Topics)?
Dave, short answer: no, at least not in the near future. We thought this would be a quick-win improvement, which turned out to be harder than we expected. Sometimes we experiment, and things don't work out; usually, those experiments never ship to beta, but this was an exception due to the short beta cycle, and a mis-estimate on our part about how hard the problem would be to fix while it was in beta.
Here's the full story:
We removed these suggestions from autocomplete in Bible and Morph searches in 8.9, because a search for these data type references never returns results in Bibles.
The reason they don't show up in searches is that Bibles themselves don't contain links to those things. Rather, some passages are identified as being about those Concepts/Themes/Topics, which means we can look them up with the {Section <...>} search extension syntax. (See Bradley's post for a fuller explanation.)
We thought that extending the autocompleter to provide the {Section} syntax would be a simple addition to existing functionality. What we didn't take into account is that after you select one these references with the Section extension, it's easy to get into a state that breaks the syntax (click the image to see the animation):
The autocompleter isn't aware of anything in the search string that isn't immediately part of the <datatype reference>, and thus re-inserts the Section extension again.
This doesn't meet our standards for shipping, and upgrading the autocompleter code to be aware of the entire text in the search string was deemed too costly for now. We might revisit this in the future.
This doesn't meet our standards for shipping, and upgrading the autocompleter code to be aware of the entire text in the search string was deemed too costly for now
I hadn't encountered that in my testing. I hope it will be restored soon, as it is much needed.
Thank you. We thought it would be a useful improvement, which no one (that I know of) was really asking for; so it's good to have affirmation that we are on the right track.
