If it's a problem for your users, then maybe you can build a selection list from the available choices. Or maybe you need something akin auto-complete: run a javascript keyboard event handler that populates your input field based on the characters typed so far.
On Tuesday, October 19, 2004, at 06:59 AM, John McGowan wrote:
Don't some newer databases have full text indexing now. (I believe MSSQL calls the feature "Full-Text Search")
Wouldn't the best solution be to use a database that supports that type of searching?
If this functionality isn't available to you in your DB then I would suggest you still use swish-e like Bill suggests...
1. create a "dummy site" that will have a unique page for every record in the table that you're looking for.
www.mysite.com/dbindex/main.taf
2. when you hit main.taf it generates a link to each record in the table you care about
www.mysite.com/dbindex/main.taf?id=xxxxx
www.mysite.com/dbindex/main.taf?id=yyyyy
www.mysite.com/dbindex/main.taf?id=zzzzzz
(if you're familiar with witango this should take you about 5 minutes to accomplish)
3. Tell swish-e to index the site by hitting the initial main.taf url.
4. now when you want to do a full text search of the table, you call swish-e's searching functionality. it will return a list of the matching entries.
www.mysite.com/dbindex/main.taf?id=aaaaa
www.mysite.com/dbindex/main.taf?id=bbbbb
www.mysite.com/dbindex/main.taf?id=cccccc
5. Of course at this point you know that if you strip out the "www.mysite.com/dbindex/main.taf?id=" You will have the part of the url that you care about, the aaaaa,bbbbb,ccccc which should be in a ranked order, and now you can do with that information whatever you want.
6. Schedule the re running of step 3. at some interval that satisfies your need for accuracy vs. performance.
Of course this all assumes you're doing this for 1 particular table. However, if you had more than 1 table you could still do it all by adding a little more code to your main.taf and some more logic to the part that stripps the url to get the important part.
/John
Roland Dumas wrote:
_______________________________________________________________________ _But, we're talking about a search of a database.
On 10/18/04 5:59 PM, "Bill Conlon" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Roland,
You've heard this from me before on this list. Take a look at swish-e.
You could use its built-in spider to index your site, and then use the
built-in cgi-script to highlight your results. It's really a great
piece of software.
Now if you take the swish-e approach, here's what I would do to solve this.
Dyanmically create metatags for the key parameters you want to search:
<meta name="vineyard" content="Chateau Lafite, Chateau, Lafite"> <meta name="varietal" content="Pinot Noir, Pinot, Noir"> etc.
Use witango to tokenize while creating the HTML pages for the various wines.
Then use swish-e's meta name search.
On Monday, October 18, 2004, at 05:39 PM, Roland Dumas wrote:
In search engines, when you submit a search string, the search engine_____________________________________________________________________ ___
first
tokenizes and then searches for each substring string separately and
then
brings them together as your found set. So if I search for 1961 Chateau
Lafite, I'll get items with 1961, others with Chateau or Chateu
Lafite, and
on top will be the found records with 1961 Chateau Lafite (I know, if
you
put it in quotes, it forces it to find only the whole string. That
part is
easy)
They will also rank a find of the full set of terms above ones with one or two terms in the documents.
Questions:
What's the approach with witango that will enable the search of tokenized strings.
Any ideas on how to do a crude ranking, such that the full term comes
up on
top of the found set?
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