Last modified: 2008-08-29 04:49:42 UTC
Currently it appears that it's only possible to do boolean AND #ask commands. It would be very useful to be able to use boolean OR and NOT functions as well. Examples: {{#ask: [[Category:Cities]] [[Location::Europe]]}} is a boolean AND and will return all cities in europe. However, this is limited, as it's not possible to find cities in two countries, for example those who speak German: {{#ask: [[Category:Cities]] AND [[Location::Germany]] OR [[Location::Luxembourg]] OR [[Location::Austria]] OR [[Location::Switzerland]] }} Or all cities in mainland europe: {{#ask: [[Category:Cities]] AND NOT [[Location::United Kingdom]] OR [[Location::Ireland]] }} These are pretty basic examples, but such functionality would make the #ask function much, much more useful in many situations.
Actually it is possible. It should be documented, I didn't need to search any source code to know how to do these. For your two examples these should work: {{#ask: [[Category:Cities]] [[Location::Germany||Luxembourg||Austria||Switzerland]] }} and for the other: {{#ask: [[Category:Cities]] [[Location::!United Kingdom||Ireland]] }} Basically the two things you didn't catch in the user manual are: After the :: in ask queries an operator is allowed. This may be >, <, !, and if the wiki has it enabled ~ is also allowed. The > and < are for inclusive greater and less than (They are actually the same as >= and <= rather than the exclusive forms), and ! is for things which are not part of a property. The ~ isn't enabled by default, but it is for LIKE queries, in the form where ? is one character and * is any number of characters. And the other thing is that inside of a property you can separate multiple allowed values (an OR) with two pipes ||.
great, thanks Dan.
