Ants Site News: Tour Central Advanced Search Now Available
 

If you were to go back in time, and read the first notes scribbled down on paper that would serve as the seeds to what has eventually grown into the largest single band-focused website on the Internet, you would find two little words in the margins of that crumpled note: "Search Engine." Nearly 20 years later (my goodness!), we're so proud to finally release it.

Sure, Tour Central has always had "search" since its inception. Technically. But for once, technically correct is not the best kind of correct. It was a very basic version that let you search show data fields as if they were text. Sometimes it would work; often times it didn't offer the flexibility to be any sort of useful. It had been on our list, literally, for years (decades?), and we actually managed to put it together in the summer of 2019, but then life happened, and it got put on the back burner.

Ants Tour Central has always been the foundation of the site, with an advanced database that was built from the start to be a powerful and flexible means of storing data about the band's performances. It's been tweaked and extended over the years, but at its core, was intelligently designed to scale as it has over the better part of two decades. The power and flexibility of Tour Central has enabled us to bring this advanced search engine to the site!

The Tour Central Search Engine allows you to search for a single song, or multiple. You can stipulate that any song is an opener, a set closer, in the encore, or the encore closer. Or, you can string multiple songs together and turn up shows where those tunes were played in order. All of these options can be filtered by further metrics, such as guest, venue, artist and show date range. On top of that, you can also have it only display shows that are streamable on DMB Hub, or available to download on Ants. You can even check the box to only search against shows you've seen, so you can create a lot of personal queries. And when you've built your favorite searches, you can save them to your Tour Stats, so they're always accessible (and sharable!).

With a new tour comes renewed energy, and Ants is getting a ton of work poured into it, in various areas (more to come on that!). Stay tuned to Ants for the latest as we roll out more features, and we hope you're enjoying the tour so far!

Tour Central Search Engine

Re: Ants Site News: Tour Central Advanced Search Now Available
 

Very cool, thanks for all the work you guys put into the site.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Re: Ants Site News: Tour Central Advanced Search Now Available
 

Great feature and fun to use. Thanks Matt & Co.!

Fun to see Dreaming Tree has only opened 7 times and I've seen... 1 of them. :D

Re: Ants Site News: Tour Central Advanced Search Now Available
 

This is awesome! Thank you, Matt! And now any chance of a productive work day is out the window...

Re: Ants Site News: Tour Central Advanced Search Now Available
 

did you put it through its UAT cycles? Get stakeholder signoff? ;)

Just kidding, nice work

Re: Ants Site News: Tour Central Advanced Search Now Available
 

UAT? That’s still a thing? At our company, we launch and test in production ;)

Re: Ants Site News: Tour Central Advanced Search Now Available
 

Gonna need some JIRA action on this puppy. Let’s all convene at 4.

Re: Ants Site News: Tour Central Advanced Search Now Available
 

This is awesome, thanks guys!

Re: Ants Site News: Tour Central Advanced Search Now Available
 

Great new feature! We all get caught up in song chasing so between here and the Almanac I hope one day they make a list for each user of the 10 most played songs that user hasn’t seen live yet.

Re: Ants Site News: Tour Central Advanced Search Now Available
 

that’s what real men do! Only cowards test in a pre-prod environment first.

Re: Ants Site News: Tour Central Advanced Search Now Available
 

Would this be a good place to mention that the search functions in the Downloads section have some issues? If I enter the search term "sbd" and click on Filter, it shows me a first page of results that match this keyword. That being said, if I click on Next at the bottom of the list, it shows me a page of the entire list of shows, not just shows with the keyword "sbd". I assume the issue is that the search string is a POST variable instead of a GET variable. Therefore, it cannot currently get passed to the GET link. I've been hacking my way around this limitation by manually changing the action link of the search form in browser debugging tools to show later entries with the start parameter, then entering my search parameter and filtering, but most normal people would never think of something like this.

Ants Site News: Tour Central Advanced Search Now Available
 

Thanks Matt. It seems a very cool feature.

A couple of questions:

• is the search function available also on DMBHub app? I don’t see it

• Clicking on the link from an iPhone, I get this error message. Tried also with Chrome, same result. Is it suppose to work on iOS?

https://images2.imgbox.com/10/2b/0aEm4Ue9_o.jpeg

Re: Ants Site News: Tour Central Advanced Search Now Available
 

Nope, not yet. Given that it's not only very complex on the backend, but the front end (UI) as well, it's going to take quite a bit of work to include it in DMB Hub. Eventually it will get there, but it'll be a big undertaking. Most likely DMB Hub 2.0.

Error in the Link on the news story - thanks for the heads up on that. Fixed.

Re: Ants Site News: Tour Central Advanced Search Now Available
 

Looks like it's just a bad link. Here's the correct URL: https://www.antsmarching.org/tour/search/search.php

Re: Ants Site News: Tour Central Advanced Search Now Available
 

This is great!! Thanks for all the time and work that went into this! :thumbsup

Re: Ants Site News: Tour Central Advanced Search Now Available
 

Filling out a contact us form would work also, but I've fixed this up for you. Thanks for bringing it to my attention! Give it a shot and let me know if that works!

Re: Ants Site News: Tour Central Advanced Search Now Available
 

I may be doing it wrong, but it seems You Never Know has been played exactly twice in nearly 20 years in the state of Florida. That's absurd.

Re: Ants Site News: Tour Central Advanced Search Now Available
 

Thank you

Re: Ants Site News: Tour Central Advanced Search Now Available
 

Yeah, this is excellent. Cheers!

Re: Ants Site News: Tour Central Advanced Search Now Available
 

Thanks for the quick fix! Along the same lines, sorting options are not retained when using the next links. Likely just a matter of adding the s GET variable to the next and previous links.

1. Go to Downloads section
2. Set the sorting by completed
3. Add sbd in search. Gets you sorted search results.
4. Click on next. Now shows page 2 of sbd results, but not does not follow selected sort order

Re: Ants Site News: Tour Central Advanced Search Now Available
 

Got it, thanks! Filter/sort options should now persist, whether clicking the Prev/Next buttons, or the column headings after searching for a term.

Admittedly I threw that downloads area page together a long time ago and the search was absolutely not fleshed out that well. Thanks for walking me through your use cases.

Re: Ants Site News: Tour Central Advanced Search Now Available
 

Works like a charm now. This is greatly appreciated!

Re: Ants Site News: Tour Central Advanced Search Now Available
 

Super cool updates. You added a lot of features I've been hoping would eventually be added for a while. Especially the DMB Hub search!

QQ, will the ability to search for shows by only month and day ever return?

I ask because this was my favorite way to use the search before the update. I would usually search for the current month and day (without year), then choose from the list of shows.

All of the new features are completely superior to this one old function but I was just curious if it was possible to include it?

Thanks for all of the hard work you put into this. It's sincerely appreciated!

Mahalo