mariovaldez.net

Mark, question for you. Searches, I'm having issues getting the results that we need in our group.

I work for a major retailer and am part of a small team in IT. We are using phprojekt and the CMS addon to keep track of our store locations and documentation that goes with each one.

I've entered in our store locations with a keyword with the state initials (UT, AZ, TX and so on) and need to be able to search for all stores in a single state... the search doesn't work well with that, and it doesn't seem to accept regular expressions...

for example, if i search for UT, it turns up most of my stores, not just the ones with the keyword UT

can the search do case sensitive searches, or perhaps quoted searches of any type?

Thanks!

The CMS uses a case sensitive search, but you can not use quotes.
You are most likely getting the results back because the letters UT are somewhere in the text. For instance if you had the word OUT in capitals in the text of a document, it would show in the results.

Perhaps you should try to use a unique code to seperate your stores like @UT, @AZ, @CA, etc..

No, its definitely not doing a case sensitive search.

Unfortunately, when I set this up, I didn't use a unique identifyer like @UT or something... and it wouldn't display very nice either, since the title has the city and state.

Unluckily, in my summary, I have a word that includes ut, (Layout) and it appears in every summary.

Also, it only displays 10 responses to the search, is this confiurable?

Sorry about that, didn't realize that I wasn't logged in.

Charles

I have just thourghly tested it again, & I am performing case sensitve searches. What version of the CMS are you using?

CMS4P/0.6.0b10 Phprojekt/4.0 Apache/1.3.28 Mysql/FreeBSD 4.9

Wokka, Mark:

Hi. The case sensitiveness of the CMS searches depends on the database backend. Yes, by default the CMS code sends a "LIKE %searchword%" to the database server... for most brands and versions that means "search everything which contains searchword, no matter the case"... but some servers do a case-sensitive search.

If you delete the "LIKE" then the search is case-sensitive, but wildcards (%) are disabled on some servers, which is useless.

Also, currently, the search function will scan not only the main content, but also the abstract, the keywords and user comments. And, if you entered the content in HTML, tags are not stripped. And there are some issues if searching for non-English characters.

I know. The search function needs to be rewritten to include other important things (like boolean operators, weighted results, and searching within uploaded files), but the case-sensitive issue will be a bit complex (because we rely on the DB backend to do the search). Also the HTML thing.

Maybe a two-step search/filtering (the first in the DB server and the second in the PHP realm) will be the solution. But I need to think more carefully on this one.

Of course, sugestions, comments and requests, are welcome.


Regards,

Mario A. Valdez-Ramirez.

For any SQL developer reading,

No, I cannot use any string SQL function, as they are different for every server brand. (Yeah, I was shocked too).

Maybe I'll propose Albrecht (from Phprojekt) to include some richer conversion for SQL strings in the Phprojekt DB functions (which the CMS module uses).

I'll need to rethink this.

Mario A. Valdez-Ramirez.