Here's a topic which to my recollection (surprisingly) hasn't been brought up: Assuming development in an object-oriented environment, it's a fair assumption that the eventual target of searching is an object. How are developers making this happen?
Are all fields of the objects indexed and displayed accordingly (this means that the Document essentially takes the place of the object for search results. bad idea IMHO)? Is there some way for the object to be instantiated, then populated? How are these objects then displayed as search results? Here are some comments I have: a) Documents shouldn't be used for displaying search results. To do so would be inflexible and limit the type of data displayed as results to the fields in a document. This means that if you wish to display more information, more information has to be added to the document. This somewhat violates the purpose of the document, I think, which is to provide an abstraction of a atomic collection of searched/indexed fields. You may be able to get away with it for simple applications, but I don't think it's a good idea. Ideally, objects should be used to display the results then, since that's what a result represents. I use Velocity, so this is easy for me. I retrieve the objects as a collection (somehow), and stuff them into the Context for rendering. b) Different types of objects obviously have different types of metadata. How can the different fields for each object be displayed, when the types of objects to be indexed aren't fixed? (I use fields and metadata interchangeably, so metadata is really a collection of fields of an object) c) I use Torque, so object instantiation and population is a pretty easy thing. I have no real solution to others, who don't have some kind of O/R tool of sorts. I have addressed these points to my satisfaction in a current app, but they are terribly reliant on a specific combination (Torque and Velocity). I'm really interested to know how other developers have approached this. Regards, Kelvin Tan Relevanz Pte Ltd http://www.relevanz.com 180B Bencoolen St. The Bencoolen, #04-01 S(189648) Tel: 6238 6229 Fax: 6337 4417 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For additional commands, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
