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Show HN: Typeflow – Type-ahead as a Service (typeflow.io)
3 points by alediaferia 3651 days ago
3 comments

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...

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

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

The demos aren't working, at least not in iOS Chrome.
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. :)
Same for Android chrome.
Also not working in android chrome
What's the difference between this and jQuery autocomplete (or similar things) ?
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.
Can I use that as description for the service? :)
Sure, why not.
This an API, jQuery autocomplete is a Javascript library. Typeflow is inteded for big amounts of strings to autocomplete. It lets you push a list of strings to the typeflow API and exposes an endpoint for querying it via an HTTP API. You can easily make it working with Twitter Typeahead or jQuery autocomplete leaving the computation of the suggestion to the API.