User friendly errors in advanced query parsing

[fengelniederhammer]

GenSpectrum/dashboards#1156 added advanced query validation on the dashboards. Some of the errors that you get from invalid advanced queries aren't really nice to display in a frontend.

Think about how we can improve that.

[fhennig]

We don't know yet how we can implement this; what it would entail to get better, more detailed error messages. First step is thus, that we investigate this (how much effort would it be?)

[fhennig]

For unknown metadata fields, this is a bit crazy:

For syntax errors, the message is a bit cryptic:

also a weird syntax error message (what happened to the >?):

Besides that, these are the error cases (Claude's output):

Error cases

1. Syntax error (ANTLR parse failure)
   Failed to parse advanced query (line :): .

2. Unknown metadata field
   Metadata field does not exist. Known fields: .

3. Wrong operator for field type (<= or >= on a non-date/float/int field)
   expression <= cannot be used for field of type
   expression >= cannot be used for field of type

4. Invalid value for typed field

• Date: '' is not a valid date:
• Float: '' is not a valid float
• Integer: '' is not a valid integer
• Boolean: '' is not a valid boolean

5. Lineage field edge cases

• Null/blank value: Invalid lineage: is NULL - to search for NULL values use \IsNull()?
• Trailing dot: Invalid lineage: must not end with a dot. Did you mean '*'?

6. Regex on non-string field
   Metadata field '' of type does not support regex search. Only string fields do.

7. PhyloDescendantOf on non-phylo field
   Metadata field '' of type does not support PhyloDescendantOf queries.

8. Unrecognized segment/gene in named mutation
   is not a known segment or gene, known segments are , known genes are
   Or for insertions: is not a known segment or gene

9. Invalid mutation symbol

• Invalid nucleotide symbol:
• Invalid amino acid symbol:

10. Segment-unqualified mutation on a multi-segmented genome
    Reference genome is multi-segmented, you must specify segment as part of mutation query

11. Unexpected/internal error (catch-all)
    Unexpected error parsing query.

12. SILO semantic validation failure (only when doFullValidation: true)
    The raw SILO error message is passed through when SILO returns a 4xx. This catches things like invalid mutation positions or unknown genes that LAPIS can't validate locally.

Most of these look alright, specific enough.