
Show HN: Typeflow – Type-ahead as a Service - alediaferia
https://typeflow.io
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cphoover
Hmmm... interesting concept.. I would add some features personally. A lot of
the time typeahead calls for more than just a string, there should be away to
display rich data objects in a template. Also there needs to be an API post
endpoint so that data insertion/updates can be automated through an ETL
process of some kind.

my 2 cents...

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alediaferia
If you look at the Documentation section do you manage to find the API post
you're looking for?

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cphoover
Hmm If I were to design this... I would make it so that you don't have to
replace the entire data source each time... I think a "suggestion" entry in
the data source should be represented as it's own entity in the API...

e.g

instead of PUT /api/datasource/<UUID> overriding the entire datasource each
time..

allow an api user to insert lines of text or rich objects.

POST /api/datasource/<UUID>/suggestion

    
    
      {
       ...
      }
    

or support bulk insertion.

POST /api/datasource/<UUID>/suggestion

    
    
      [
          { ...
          },...
      ]
    

This works better for scaling when you can't just replace all suggestions in
one request (like an ETL like operation for a very large dataset). Then you
can also allow for updating single "suggestion" entities without replacing the
whole dataset.

I also think you should support rich objects, allow for things like boosting
rules, different templates for object types, spelling correction, synonyms. I
think this type of service would be really useful.

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alediaferia
This is a great piece of advice. Thank you very much. I'll try and investigate
this opportunity.

Anyway, if you're interested most of the code in the web-service relies on:

[http://github.com/alediaferia/prefixmap](http://github.com/alediaferia/prefixmap)

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adwmayer
The demos aren't working, at least not in iOS Chrome.

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alediaferia
Thank you for letting me know. I don't have an iOS device handy to try but
I'll investigate anyway to make it working on mobile as well. Should work on
FF and Chrome desktop though. :)

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bbcbasic
Same for Android chrome.

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conradk
What's the difference between this and jQuery autocomplete (or similar things)
?

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stephenr
This is a backend service for hipsters who want their app to rely on 22
different saas vendors, so they can collect their "reinvented a LIKE clause
with an external service" badge.

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alediaferia
Can I use that as description for the service? :)

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stephenr
Sure, why not.

