Look at it this way, you could probably write a bunch of Witango code to try to simulate the full text searching that would be available by using swish-e or a database that has that feature built in, but why would you. The whole reason Witango was made extensible in the first place was so that you could leverage third party tools (COM objects, JavaBeans, EXE command line programs) to solve problems.
/John
Roland Dumas wrote:
Hmmmm.... Looking at swish-e, it's clear that it's a more powerful approach, but...
If I want to keep life simple and have everything running from witango - even if I won't get all the swish-e bells and whistles, is there a better approach? Or am I hearing that witango isn't really a good tool for this task?
On 10/19/04 8:15 AM, "Bill Conlon" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Then, maybe spidering the forum content is the easiest way to do this. It will let you do free form searching. The cgi script included with swish-e will highlight found terms, and let the user apply various restrictions.
The other thing is you don't have to worry about a SQL injection attack.
On Tuesday, October 19, 2004, at 08:06 AM, Roland Dumas wrote:
It's a search function for a forum. Dynamic popups won't work here, because it's a search of subject and content, which would overwhelm a selection menu.
My thoughts were like this:
User's Search string = first argument Search string parsed (by space and comma) and the articles tossed out. That leaves an array of words within the first argument. The first argument and the remaning substrings comprise all the OR conditions you want.
Option 1: Generate SQL from a <@ROWS> that just appends a series of OR statements to the SELECT command.(easiest to do, but least secure)
Option 2: Write a taf in XML, using the <@ROWS> to create a custom <Criteria> section in a temporary taf that is just the search action, and then call that action with a branch/return. (typos will crash tango server - venturing into deep unknown)
Option 3: Do a For loop for each of the substrings and glue all the resultsets together (slow and painful)
Then, when you've got the amalgamated found set of records with whole string or substrings, figure a way to bubble up to the top the whole strings or items of greater value.
On 10/19/04 7:13 AM, "Bill Conlon" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Full text indexing can be expensive if your application does a lot of inserts/updates into columns that are indexed, but things like the winery/varietal shouldn't be a problem if you want to get it out of the db.
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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