launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Marc Tardif <marc.tardif@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

* curtis Hovey <curtis.hovey@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> [2012-01-16 12:13 -0500]:
> On 01/16/2012 11:43 AM, Marc Tardif wrote:
> > The Ubuntu Friendly website [1] would like to enable people to ask
> > questions about systems and we would like to use Launchpad
> > Answers. The typical use case would look like:
> > 
> > 1. User finds system on Ubuntu Friendly;
> > 2. User creates a question about the system;
> > 3. Other users can see the question and answers for the system.
> > 
> > The problem is with the third step: how can we get the list of questions
> > that were created for a given system? We thought about creating a
> > title for the question when redirecting to Launchpad that could then be
> > searched easily, but the user can then decide to change the title. We
> > also thought about first creating a bug with a tag before creating the
> > question, but that seems rather circumvoluted and not sure whether it
> > would even work.
> > 
> > So, what would be a reasonable solution to cover the above use case?
> 
> Titles are rarely changed. Tags would be nice, but Answers does not
> support them. Questions can be linked to FAQs though, and that might
> help to locate questions.
> 
> Answers has an incomplete API that might help (the Purple Squad exported
> the query methods to solve some maintenance problems). You can get a lot
> of information about questions from the user and project perspectives. I
> think exporting IFAQSet and IFAQ to permit searching and getting the
> related_questions would help you. This is an example of what you can do now.

If I understand correctly, the Ubuntu Friendly website would provide a
link to Launchpad Answers for asking questions that would set the model
name in the title:

https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu-friendly/+addquestion?field.title=Question+about+Inspiron+1520

Then, the Ubuntu Friendly website could provide a link to search for
related questions by attempting to match the same model name:

  https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu-friendly/+questions?field.search_text=Inspiron+1520

Assuming that people aren't likely to change the title and that full
text search on the model name might return a few unrelated questions,
this approach might be good enough.

-- 
Marc Tardif <marc.tardif@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
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