Re: [htdig] Search Product Question

[Gilles D. <gr...@sc...>]

According to Chris Raymond:
> I'm wondering whether or not HT Dig will work in a project I am working on
> for one of our clients.  We're preparing a basic electronic technical guide
> on CD-ROM and I would like to find a search product to incorporate into it's
> use.  This product will be used to search .html and .pdf documents that
> reside on the same CD-ROM.  There will be approximately 150 documents that
> range in size from a single type written page to some forty pages in length.

Indexing such a collection of documents with "relocatable" URLs is a little
bit tricky to do, but it is feasible to do this with htdig.

> I would like something that could categorize the information contained
> within these documents and then produce a hypertext lists of respective
> intra-CD documents in response to a user's search criteria.  This function
> would be called from within an .html file and the results should be
> displayed accordingly.

This is the difficult part.  If you want to allow search queries to be
done from an HTML file, then you have to stick to what the HTML standard
allows as far as allowed actions from HTML forms.  The standard is that
the action attribute of the <form> tag must be an http URL, which calls
a CGI program on an http server to process the form's input fields.
It's kind of hard to package that onto a CD-ROM.  You'd need to package
a simple HTTP server on the CD, which would call htsearch to parse the
query, and have this server running on the system that reads the CD
before the web browser would need to call this server.  Either that or
you set up an non-HTML based search interface.

-- 
Gilles R. Detillieux              E-mail: <gr...@sc...>
Spinal Cord Research Centre       WWW:    http://www.scrc.umanitoba.ca/
Dept. Physiology, U. of Manitoba  Winnipeg, MB  R3E 3J7  (Canada)