Search doesn't do anything

[megodoonch]

The search function doesn't appear to do anything. I can type into the form, but nothing changes after I tap either the search button or the search button within the keyboard.

version 1.1.0 on Android 8.0.0 for LG

The state the app was in when the bug occurred: brand new, this was the first thing I tried after downloading it

What you expected to happen: I guess some search results to come up, or at least a message that nothing was found.

What actually happened: nothing changed

Any error messages that were shown to you: none

[CactiChameleon9]

Same issue here. The search happens (download speed goes up and then down after 2 seconds) but no information is displayed.

[urza9814]

Same issue with 1.1.0 on Android 7...

[kuba-orlik]

Same on 8.1.0

[Yky]

A specific example of what you searched for that apparently does nothing would be useful here.

I had the same impression at first, but it seems like the search does in fact happen. However, when no search results are found, there is no feedback to the user about this. The screen stays exactly the same as before clicking on the search button, which makes it seem like nothing happens.

A simple solution could be to show the user that no results have been found in this case for better user experience.

[urza9814]

The example given on the F-Droid page for this app is "Chocolate Cookie". If I search "Chocolate Cookie", nothing comes up. "Cookie" gives nothing, nor does "Cake" or "Salt" or "Chip" or "Apple" or "Pepper" or even just the letter "e". The main github page here and the app's help section both indicate that it should be searching on openfoodfacts.org, and all of these terms do give plenty of results if I search from that website.

[Yky]

Which Locale is configured on your device and which openfoodfacts URL are you comparing it with? The search is configured to search via the URL .openfoodfacts.org, which will lead to a lot of searches to not work if your locale is not "en" for the above mentioned search terms.

[urza9814]

My device language is configured as "English (United States)". I didn't see any settings page where I could configure the openfoodfacts URL, so I ran a packet capture on my firewall and found a DNS lookup by my phone for us.openfoodfacts.org, so I assume that's what it's using.

Looking further in the packet capture, what I'm seeing is "Handshake Failure (40)". Can't really tell why though -- I see my phone sending a TLS 1.2 Client Hello, with the supported ciphers list including "Cipher Suite: TLS_ECDHE_RSA_WITH_AES_256_GCM_SHA384 (0xc030)"...and when I visit us.openfoodfacts.org from the browser and check the certificate information, I see "Connection Encrypted (TLS_ECDHE_RSA_WITH_AES_256_GCM_SHA384, 256 bit keys, TLS 1.2)"

Let me know if you can think of anything else I can try...here's the packet capture in case you wanted to take a look yourself:
packetcap.zip

[anddam]

Would #76 solve this issue?

I am using a Pixel phone with en_GB system language setting and I had no results at all, swiching to en_US does in fact provide results. Is there a way to get the debugging log of what the program is doing?

[Yky]

#76 would solve some of the issues people are having with the search results.

There is no way to see what is happening the in the log, since the app does not have any logging for the code that configures the locale that is used for searching. You can attach a debugger or look at the source code to see what is going on, though.

[VA1DER]

No search results using en_CA or en_US.

Using the locale to choose the web site without user input or ability to override was a particularly bad idea. Bring silent about the error when a search fails ranks right up there too.

[DestyNova]

Sadly this design choice means that the app is unusable for people outside the US. It's not even clear that anything is happening when I tap the search button, so it's quite a confusing experience.
It'd be good to at least get an error message. Ideally, there would be an options menu where you could disable the locale based selection of API endpoints. Or only use that mode for known-supported locales, and fall back to a safe default otherwise.