The things you can do with search

I've added a few new options that will help make the events search better.

These only apply if a single type=event is supplied and no other type is specified.

It makes no sense to try and search for conversations by event properties... these options are for events only.

Namely, it is now possible to:

• Find events happening after a certain date
  
• Find events happening before a certain date
  
• Find events between certain dates
  
• Order the events with the oldest one first
  
• Order the events with the newest one first
  
  

Those 5 capabilities required two new query options, and to extend the sort one.

The two new options are eventBefore and eventAfter.

Those options can have values which are any of the following:

• A number, which is the count of days from today: -7 = last week, 0 = today, 7 = next week
  
• A date in ISO format, 2014-02-28
  
• A date and time in ISO format, 2014-02-28T14:00
  
  

These can be supplied in a myriad of ways:

• eventBefore=0 = Find all events that happened before today
  
• eventBefore=-31 = Find all events that happened before a month ago
  
• eventBefore=2014-01-01 = Find all events that happened before the 1st Jan 2014
  
• eventAfter=0 = Find all events that are happening after today
  
• eventAfter=31 = Find all events that are happening more than a month from now
  
• eventAfter=2014-01-01 = Find all events that happened (or are happening) after the 1st Jan 2014
  
• eventAfter=-7&eventBefore=0 = Find all events that happened in the last week
  
• eventAfter=0&eventBefore=31 = Find all events happening in the next month
  
• eventAfter=2014-08-01&eventBefore=2014-08-31 = Find all events that occurred in August 2014
  
  

The sort option has also been extended, and the two new options are available if your search result came from type=event only:

• sort:oldest = Show the oldest events first, order by the event date (not the date of the last comment)
  
• sort:newest = Show the newest events first, order by the event date (not the date of the last comment)
  
  

What this means, is that very shortly I'll add form controls to the search page to make it easier to find events that are about to happen, or that have just happened... I doubt many people will be searching for more complex scenarios but they are possible.

These things are best demonstrated... here is a link that will forever find events that have occurred within the last week, as well as all events into the future, and it then orders all of those events by the date showing the oldest first so it's like an agenda of upcoming events:
https://www.lfgss.com/search/?type=event&eventAfter=-7&sort=oldest