Re: [Bodington-developers] Wildcards in search tool

[Jon M. <jo...@te...>]

Peter Crowther wrote:

>>From: Colin Tatham
>>I think there are two possible approaches:
>>
>>1. Use regular expressions to find possible matches of the 
>>search term 
>>in the identical_table Hashtable keys, or
>>
>>2. Execute an SQL query with wildcards on the table that contains the 
>>tokens.
>>    
>>
>
>3. Bite the bullet, throw away the homebrew XML repository and use
>somebody else's work.  My candidate would be eXist, which has much of
>this functionality already built in to XQuery.
>
>		- Peter
>  
>
Or Apache Xindice? I'm not familiar with the product but one would hope 
that it has as much support behind it as the other Apache XML tools. 
Before taking this radical approach it would be important to determine 
that the replacement would be equally capable. (E.g. capable of handling 
accent insensitive searching which is vital for searching non-english 
text by users who aren't sure how to type accented characters into the 
search tool or for searching text which may have optional accents or 
incorrect orthography, not to say Japanese text which may have been 
entered in either of two phonetic systems.)

Sticking with the Bodington XML query tool I'd say there is another 
option to your two: add a 'loose match' word matching field to tertiary, 
secondary, primary and exact. However, I don't think that would be the 
prefered option - I'd go for your option 2. So a search for 'open' AND 
'source' would trigger an initial SQL query whose results would be used 
to create an altered query like ('open' OR 'opening') AND ('source' OR 
'sources') before being executed.

It will be sad to see the XML repository go - I'm very proud of the 
concept of translating an object oriented XML search specification into 
a single SQL query. It works very well with databases that can highly 
optimise the resultant query. Of course it's becoming redundant as a 
number of pure XML database products become available that are well 
optimised to XPath type searches. I'd be interested to see performance 
comparisons between my XML to SQL translator and a pure XML database 
like Xindice.

Jon