Hey everyone, this weekend ended up really busy, so I didn't have the time to get the Custom Search feature as polished as I had planned, but I decided to go ahead and make it available in its current state. You can find it in the menu under the Vehicles section. In my own testing, it is perfectly functional. I intentionally started small and only included a handful of options to choose from. I plan to expand this out in the coming days. There are a couple of quirks to keep in mind when you use this tool.
- It won't protect you from yourself ;) By that I mean, it will let you search for cars that just do not exist. Like a Rapid Blue 70th Anniversary Stingray with the Z07 package. It will happily let you search for that and just say the results are 0 vehicles found. I plan to add some logic to hide some options depending on other options you select to help out people that may not have a detailed knowledge of the options... but for now you'll just have to have a decent understanding of what options go with what model. I will need to sort of categorize the options in a more detailed way than I have been, but I think I have a solid plan for this.
- The option set is limited. I started small just to validate that it works. There are also some challenges that come with this sort of tool that I didn't have time to address. Like most of us know that Z07 equipped cars come with either the T0F or T0G aero package... but the Z07's also have the CFV or CFZ option codes in their window sticker. So if someone wants a list of all the CFV or CFZ equipped Z06's... the search would also return all Z07's since they have one of those options as well. So I need to add some logic here. I'm thinking either a third page in the custom search page where a user can specify if they want to remove Z07's in the example above, or maybe I'll just have it to that automatically for certain options. I'm not sure yet. This will be a bit of a task and I really just didn't have time to get to it this weekend.
The Custom Search tool is available for everyone to use, however, only registered users will see the detailed results of their search (the list of matching vehicles). Non-registered users will only see a count of how many vehicles matched their search terms. I hate putting stuff behind the login page, but in all honestly, blame the handful of people who are relentlessly trying to scrape data from the site. If I made the full search results publicly available, these guys would brute force the hell out of that page trying to pull the entire database out of it one search at a time.