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Pq Not Returning What I Expected


ctgreybeard

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I've just started to set up a couple of pocket queries and I'm not getting what I expect.

 

When I search in the "regular" search page for zip code 06801 I get caches near to me followed by ones further away as expected.

 

But when I add a PQ search for 06801 the nearest is 7 miles away. There are MANY that are closer that aren't returned. I've even tried adding my home coords rather than usingthe zip code and I get the same results.

 

I have a few attributes denied such as "boat", "scuba gear", etc. and that seems to be the problem. If I don't select any attributes to exclude (the icon with the slash through it) I get what I would expect.

 

Perhaps I am using the icons/attributes incorrectly? If I don't want to see a chache that, for instance, requires scuba gear I select the scuba gear icon twice so that it shows with a red box with a slash through it, right?

 

I guess I can just skip over the ones I'm not interested in but I thought it ought to work right anyway.

 

Bill W.

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ctgreybeard,

 

The caches that are eliminated from your PQ, do they have any attributes at all?

 

The other thing is, you're choosing attributes that it is looking for on the cache page, so if you choose the scuba attribute, it is going to look for that attribute on the cache before returning it to you. You need to do a positive attribute search, which will eliminate the ones you don't want to see.

 

edit: YMMV. I always just go ahead and return a full PQ since there are still caches without attributes out there. If everyone would add attributes it would be perfect. I'm not sure if these are the issues with your PQ, just taking a stab in the dark.

 

:laughing:

Edited by robert
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I've just started to set up a couple of pocket queries and I'm not getting what I expect.

 

It's working as designed.

 

I have a few attributes denied such as "boat", "scuba gear", etc. and that seems to be the problem. If I don't select any attributes to exclude (the icon with the slash through it) I get what I would expect.

 

All the attributes you select are actually positively required. When you select "No Scuba Required" it is only looking for caches with the "No Scuba Required" attribute. This is subtly different than caches without the "Scuba Required" attribute, which there is no actually way to search for, because leaving it unselected is the same as ignoring that attribute. Because users aren't all using the attributes and because of the limit of 10 attributes, not all caches where scuba is not required are going to be marked the way you would need them to be marked for the system to answer your question the way it is currently designed.

 

Perhaps I am using the icons/attributes incorrectly? If I don't want to see a chache that, for instance, requires scuba gear I select the scuba gear icon twice so that it shows with a red box with a slash through it, right?

 

I don't know if there are plans to add a way to invert the search criteria as you want to do. The way it works right now doesn't appear to be intuitive to the average user because you cannot search for the absence of an attribute, although the first impression from the interface is that you can.

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OK, I hear what everyone is saying and I would judge that it is broken as it is. But it's not a big deal to me, I just thought that it worked differently than it did.

 

Interesting, though, that SOME caches were actually returned even though the attributes (climbing gear, scuba/swimming required, etc.) weren't specified in ANY of the caches that might have qualified.

 

I'll just accept that attributes selection is broken as designed. When I hear that they are fixed I'll try again.

 

Bill

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Might be quirky. Maybe you are running into some PQ limit issues - I know that if you aren't doing a proximity style search, there is (or at least used to be) no explicit ordering in the PQ and so you can get different results depending on how the SQL Server optimizes the execution plan. If your criteria were so broad that more than 500 (or whatever) were returned, some could appear and disappear - but they still need to match the attribute criteria so I wouldn't think that's anything to do with it. Without knowing the exact criteria, I couldn't tell you much more.

 

In my tests with the $ for example, it was reliable. Regularly my little test query returns 4 caches (watchlist caches I have found - I watch caches I have found until someone else finds them or there is something special about them).

 

Turning on $ returns no caches. Turning on No$ returns no caches.

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Might be quirky.

That's an understatement.

 

All I did was put in a PQ query from my home ZIP (and the same query using my home LATLONG did the same) and added some attributes which seemed to screw things up. Generally, I added NO scuba, NO swimming, NO climbing gear, NO etc. that meant I had to do excess climbing or whatever. The only attributes I selected were negative (slash-type) selections.

 

The interesting part was that the result INCLUDED caches that were 6.7 mi. and more from the ZIP or home location. These were ones that I would have expected in the list. Nothing closer was included until I removed all of the attribute specs from the query. How the attributes and distance are related I have no idea.

 

Bill

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You've got some major cache density there! Man - I have to go out 25 miles to get more than two dozen unfound caches - we've only just passed 500 in our state.

 

I can only go out 21 miles from that zip code to get 500 caches. 22 miles and it maxes out. No other criteria.

 

Turn on NoScuba attribute and I get no results at all.

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You've got some major cache density there!

Why, thank you very much! I think the Northeast US does have a high density, makes for busy weekends! I think it is because we have a lot of small public parks. I've noticed that we seem to have a high number of micro and virtual caches. Small parks are hard to fit a regular-sized cache into so people use magnetic micros and even virtuals to put caches in places that aren't easy.

 

I haven't needed my scuba gear even once for any of these which is why I selected no-scuba in the first place.

 

Bill

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If you selected 5 No attributes it would return any cache that has ANY of the No attributes. It doesn't need ALL the No attributes

 

From what I can tell:

 

I select dogs and money and I get caches with dogs OR money

 

I select dogs and no money and I get caches with dogs AND no money

 

I select no dogs and money and I get caches with no dogs AND money

 

I select no dogs and no money and I get caches with no dogs OR no money

 

So it looks like all the positives go into one part ORed together and the negatives go into another ORed together.

 

And if you find a regular user who thinks that way, I'd love to meet them.

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