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Moogle

An easy way to “Google” your “Map” using search terms.

The name came from that actually. You Google a Map, giving you Moogle!

Table of Contents

Rationale

Everyone likes Array! But they come with a problem… If you want to find a specific object and you don’t know the index where is stored in the array, you have to iterate over the array to find it, making it a really slow.

Then let’s fix it with a Map! Well, it’s really fast if you already know the key, but what if you just know a bit of the key? You have to iterate over all the keys to find the ones that may match your key. It’s a bummer.

What Moogle does is joining the best of both worlds! Making it blazing fast!

How It Works

When Moogle is instantiated, it stores the lookup table you provide to it as its lookup_table property. When you add items to your lookup table via .addItem():

  1. Adds the first argument you provide to .addItem() as “search terms” and an “ID” to its index property (a Map with search terms and IDs – the IDs are mapped to items in the lookup table); and

  2. Adds the second argument you provide to .addItem() to the lookup table.

The search term is what you can search for in the index. If your search term matches anything in the index, Moogle will take the IDs associated with the search term and use them to target items in the lookup table.

For example, if you call .addItem(["hello"], "world"), the index property will become the following…

```
["hello", [0]]
```

…and the lookup table will become the following…

```
[0, "world"]
```

This means you can search for the following strings …

```
h
he
hel
hell
hello
```

…and they will all match ["hello", [0]] in the index Map. The ID in the Map (0 in this case) is used to target the lookup table via .get() – returning an item from the lookup table without having to iterate through the entire lookup table in case it has millions of items.

You should note that each search is cached, so subsequent searches of the same search term are 2x (sometimes faster) faster than the first search.

Guides

Starting

Moogle works in the browser, Node and Deno! How to do it?

In the browser:

<script type="module" src="myScript.js"></script>
// myScript.js
import { Moogle } from "https://unpkg.com/@drashland/moogle@0.0.8/lib/esm/Moogle.js";
const service = new Moogle();

In Node:

# Using npm
$ npm install @drashland/moogle

# Using yarn
$ yarn add @drashland/moogle
// JavaScript
const { Moogle } = require("@drashland/moogle");
const service = new Moogle();
// TypeScript
import { Moogle } from "@drashland/moogle";
const serviceWithTypes = new Moogle<MyType>();
const serviceWithoutTypes = new Moogle();

In Deno:

// JavaScript
import { Moogle } from "https://unpkg.com/@drashland/moogle@0.0.8/lib/esm/Moogle.js";
const service = new Moogle();
// TypeScript
import { Moogle } from "https://deno.land/x/moogle@v0.0.8/mod.ts";
const serviceWithTypes = new Moogle<MyType>();
const serviceWithoutTypes = new Moogle();

Creating the Moogle service

This uses TypeScript

  1. Instantiate Moogle.
// Create a simple Moogle that stores <unknown> values
const service = new Moogle();
// Create a Moogle that stores a specific value
const service = new Moogle<string>();
  1. Add items to your lookup table.
service.addItem(["hello"], "world"); // adds ["hello", [0]] to the index
service.addItem(["again aga"], "again"); // adds ["again", [1]] and ["aga", [1]] to the index
service.addItem(["hello"], "something"); // changes ["hello", [0]] to ["hello", [0,2]] in the index
  1. Search your lookup table.
const results = service.search("hel");

console.log(results);
// outputs => Map {
//   0 => {
//     id: 0,
//     item: "world",
//     search_term: "hello",
//     search_input: "hel"
//   },
//   2 => {
//     id: 2,
//     item: "something",
//     search_term: "hello",
//     search_input: "hel"
//   },
// }