Woocommerce-admin: Customers Report: Advanced Filtering by strings not right

[psealock]

Describe the bug

How we handle filtering by things like email don't make sense. For instance, I might want to see all customers with gmail accounts, so I'd expect to send a parameter such as email_includes=gmail, but our UI searches for a user by email in the filter and instead sends along an id, ie email_includes=76.

Affected filters

• Name
• Country
• Username
• Email

To Reproduce

1. Customers Report > Show > Advanced Filters.
2. Filter by email and see how the flow doesn't allow to search by a string.

[jeffstieler]

Are you proposing that we swap the token field search with a text input that will result in a LIKE query on the email field?

_(cc: @timmyc @LevinMedia)_

[psealock]

I think the token fields are OK, but it doesn't need to be backed with the <Search /> component. It should pass along the string so the resulting query is

?email_includes=whatever,string,i need

[timmyc]

The pattern thus far has been to use the token field approach in the filters - and a more fuzzy string match approach in the table filter that @Aljullu has worked on in Products / Taxes etc. Definitely think we should get some feedback from @LevinMedia to make sure of the direction here.

[Aljullu]

I think the token fields are OK, but it doesn't need to be backed with the <Search /> component.

Using the prop allowFreeTextSearch, the <Search /> component can accept any input, not only the ones returned by the autocompleter. So we could still use it here with little modifications, and this way we don't lose all the <Search /> features like autocompleters, accessibility and keyboard navigation.

You can see it in-action in the table search:

[timmyc]

Circling back with convo from Slack - seems like everyone is on-board with @Aljullu 's solution above ( @josemarques commented in Slack with the +1 too ).

And to prioritize the list in the original issue, I'm thinking we mainly focus on Name first, then email. Username and country, not feeling like those are as critical - the token field solution seems fine to me.

[jeffstieler]

Closing in favor of https://github.com/woocommerce/wc-admin/issues/1455 and https://github.com/woocommerce/wc-admin/issues/1457.

Per Slack convo:

can we leave the advanced filter as-is for now, and just update the search in the table? seems like a good first step

just leave the email advanced filter as-is too, and we can look at that after the table/search by customer name