Free-text search parameter 'q' only works for collection search.

[gtesoro]

As the title describes, 'q' parameter seems to only work when doing a collection search and does not work when searching for items.

This is due to items and collections having title, description and keywords fields in a different place on the json struture. For collections they are located in root and for items they are under properties.

[vincentsarago]

see #295 (comment)

cc @hrodmn

[hrodmn]

@gtesoro - one challenge with implementing free-text search for items is that there are no required text fields in the STAC item spec. For collections the description field is required, then title and keywords are defined as optional fields, so it was easy to. For items there are no guidelines about fields that can included.

The Free-Text STAC API Extension says this:

• Item: all relevant textual properties It is also allowed to query against all text fields.

Which item-level fields would you want to be able to query with free-text search?

There could be a way to refactor the tsvector search to check of the character fields in the properties but we did not implement that in the first iteration.

[gtesoro]

I do agree with you about the challenges of making it work for items.
I posted the issue more for visiblity than to get a fix. Maybe it could be better stated on the changelog that free-text is only available for collection search.

To be honest, I guess most users interface with pgstac using stac-fastapi-pgstac and that has the q parameter disabled at API level for anything that is not collection search.

I dont have really a use case for free-text item search since this issue came up on the context of a bug report for the Destination Earth Data Lake.
We were using a stac catalog to announce avialable services (Using the links metadata). As a workaround (or rather a better solution) we have turned this services into collections instead of items so we can take advantage of the free-text search.

[fmigneault]

Fixed by stac-utils/stac-fastapi-pgstac#267