#18 Search term highlighting

[Bob Weigel]

Document what is required to do search term highlighting (like on exist demo page) on returned search results.

Demo page: http://ec2-174-129-50-195.compute-1.amazonaws.com:8088/exist/sandbox/sandbox.xql
chose first option in drop-down.

[Dmitry Y Mishin]

Index configuration for Shakespeare section:

<index>
<fulltext default="none" attributes="no"/>
<lucene>
<text qname="SPEECH">
<ignore qname="SPEAKER"/>
</text>
<text qname="TITLE"/>
</lucene>
<ngram qname="SPEAKER"/>
</index>

Using this index, you can use ft:query(., 'love') function from the example with syntax hi-lighting.

[Bob Weigel]

I think that the issue is more complex with VxOware. A search typically returns a list of matching documents with only their Title and Description wrapped in a special results XML structure. Suppose the Title or Description contained a match. How would it get highlighted (what code would need to be modified, etc.)? Exist uses a different XML structure for the search results to indicate words that matched, as in <match>love</match> and then a post-process converts this to html.

The next level of usability would be for the last search term to be stored internally so that when a user looks at the full body of a matching document following a search, they see highlighted terms.

[Dmitry Y Mishin]

To highlight the term in futher documents, we can include it in every request (needs a special field in each form), or, better way, store it in a user session attribute. Then we should figure out the way to disable highlighting.

The highlight can be done using javascript on the page.

The easiest way is including a javascript to all the pages and always highlighting a term if there is a term attribute in user session.

[Bob Weigel]

Leaving request as open for now. Will revisit later.