Glance Search Library

Abstract

The LHCb experiment is one of the 4 large LHC experiments at CERN. With more than 1500 members and tens of thousands of assets, the Collaboration requires systems that allow the extraction of data from many databases according to some very specific criteria. In LHCb there are 4 production web applications responsible for managing members and institutes, tracking assets and their current status, presenting radiological information about the cavern, and supporting the management of cables. A common requirement shared across all these systems is to allow searching information based on logical expressions. Therefore, in order to avoid rework, the Glance Search Library was created with the goal of providing components for applications to deploy frontend search interfaces capable of generating standardized queries based on users’ input, and backend utility functions that compile such queries into a SQL clause. The Glance Search Library is split into 2 smaller libraries maintained in different GitLab repositories. The first one only contains Vue components and JavaScript modules and, in LHCb, it is included as a dependency of the SPAs (Single Page Applications). The second is a PHP Object-Oriented library, mainly used by REST APIs that are required to expose large amounts of data stored in their relational databases. This separation provides greater flexibility and more agile deployments. It also enables lighter applications with no graphical interface to build command line tools solely on top of the backend classes and predefined queries.