gastownhall/beads · error

failed to search issues: %w

Error message

failed to search issues: %w

What it means

ResolvePartialID resolves a partial or fully-qualified issue ID against the storage backend. After the exact-ID lookup fails, it falls back to a substring search via store.SearchIssueIDs; if that underlying storage call returns an error, it is wrapped with this message. This is a transport/storage failure, not a problem with the input ID itself — the original store error is preserved via %w.

Source

Thrown at internal/utils/id_parser.go:139

	// If exact match failed, try substring search.
	// Use the hash part as a search query to leverage SQL-level filtering
	// (id LIKE %hash%) instead of loading ALL issues into memory.
	// On large databases (23k+ issues over MySQL wire protocol), loading all
	// issues took 60+ seconds; with SQL filtering it's near-instant.
	hashPart := strings.TrimPrefix(normalizedID, prefixWithHyphen)
	searchPart, ok := partialIDSearchPart(hashPart)
	if !ok {
		return "", fmt.Errorf("no issue found matching %q", input)
	}

	// Narrow projection: this loop only reads the .ID field, so use the
	// SearchIssueIDs path instead of SearchIssues. Avoids hydrating all
	// 45+ issue columns (including big TEXT fields like description, design,
	// notes, metadata, payload) only to discard them.
	filter := types.IssueFilter{}
	ids, err := store.SearchIssueIDs(ctx, searchPart, filter)
	if err != nil {
		return "", fmt.Errorf("failed to search issues: %w", err)
	}

	var matches []string
	var exactMatch string

	for _, id := range ids {
		// Check for exact full ID match first (case: user typed full ID with different prefix)
		if id == input {
			exactMatch = id
			break
		}

		// Extract hash from each issue using config-aware prefix extraction.
		// This correctly handles multi-hyphen prefixes (e.g., "hacker-news-ko4"
		// yields hash "ko4", not "news-ko4" from naive first-hyphen split).
		var issueHash string
		if p := ExtractIssuePrefixKnown(id, knownPrefixes); p != "" && strings.HasPrefix(id, p+"-") {
			issueHash = id[len(p)+1:]

View on GitHub (pinned to 71377f2769)

Solutions

1. Inspect the wrapped cause with errors.Unwrap or %v on the returned error to see the real storage failure
2. Verify the storage backend is running and reachable (bd doctor, check the Dolt server / database file)
3. Re-run with a fresh or longer context deadline; large DBs can exceed short timeouts
4. If it appeared after an upgrade, check for schema migration steps and run them
5. Retry once connectivity is restored — this error is transient when caused by network/backend outages

Example fix

// before
id, err := utils.ResolvePartialID(ctx, store, "a3f8", cfg)
if err != nil { log.Fatal(err) } // hides the real storage cause
// after
id, err := utils.ResolvePartialID(ctx, store, "a3f8", cfg)
if err != nil {
    if errors.Unwrap(err) != nil {
        log.Fatalf("storage failure: %v", errors.Unwrap(err)) // show root cause
    }
    log.Fatal(err)
}

// Ensure the backend is reachable before resolving:
if err := store.SearchIssueIDs(ctx, "probe", types.IssueFilter{}); err != nil {
    return fmt.Errorf("storage unavailable: %w", err)
}

id, err := utils.ResolvePartialID(ctx, store, input, cfg)
if err != nil {
    var root error
    for e := err; e != nil; e = errors.Unwrap(e) { root = e }
    if ctx.Err() != nil { return fmt.Errorf("timed out: %w", ctx.Err()) }
    log.Printf("search failure root cause: %v", root)
    return err // not a not-found case; do not treat as missing issue
}

When it happens

Trigger: Calling utils.ResolvePartialID (directly or via ResolvePartialIDs) when store.SearchIssueIDs errors — e.g. the database is unreachable, the underlying SQL query fails, the context is cancelled, or the storage driver returns an I/O or wire-protocol error during the substring (LIKE) search.

Common situations: Dolt/MySQL daemon not running or crashed mid-session; network drop on a remote (MySQL wire protocol) store; context timeout exceeded on very large databases; schema mismatch after a beads version upgrade; read-only or corrupted data directory.

Related errors

• not found
• load wisp labels: %w
• edge %d %s->%s: checking planned blocking cycle: %w
• reading existing dependencies for %s: %w
• searching closed gates: %w

AI-assisted analysis of gastownhall/beads@71377f2769 (2026-08-30). Data as JSON: /api/errors/eaf80ccae6c3ab37. Report an issue: GitHub.