Multiple Sites with Differing Search Criteria

[Anonymous]

Hello Eveyone,

Sure hope someone has successfully done this. I'm using v4.2 and can't seem to find a way to search multiple sites with different search criteria.

I did find out how to search multiple sites; however, it uses my settings for the first site. I was able to create two seperate searches and each going to a separate subdir; I then concatenated the files for a 'master' search. This didn't work.

I welcome any suggestions.

Thanks,
Guy

[Guy]

I guess what I'm looking for is a process or tool to Concatenate the .zdat files that are output by Zoom. Is this possible?

[David]

The problem is probably deeper than you think. The files are not flat files. They are linked, indexed files. Like a SQL database file. We also change the format of the index files based on the settings you select (for efficiency and performance reasons).

For example, if you pick the PHP option, we allocate two bytes to store each page number. (2 bytes = max 65,000 pages). For the CGI version we allocate 4 bytes per page number (4 bytes = max 4294967296 pages). So the index files created with the CGI option are slightly larger, but can handle much larger sites.

So if you have two sites indexed with different settings, then the index files might be in a different format. For this reason, and several others, a simple concatenate of the files will never work.

But maybe there is another solution. What are the dfferences in the settings that you are using for each site and whay do you need them to be different?

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David

[Guy]

Thank you for the reply David.

We have two Intranet sites for our company.
1) for the typical "going ons" and "current news" ,etc.
2) for our employees' Payroll and HR information.


They differ in how they are managed. 1 is primarily HTML and is updated via a content manager. 2 is an ASP/ASPX site that is more interactive and database driven. We'd like 1 to have different search/indexing options (like Title and Page) than 2 (only Meta Tags).

I know that it is possible to write a page that searches each seperately; however, I need an "search all" option.

Thank you for your assistance,

Guy

[David]

Maybe you can use the same settings for your entire site but flag certain parts of certain pages as not be indexed?

This can be done using the and tags. See section 6.5 the users guide for more details about these tags,
http://www.wrensoft.com/ftp/zoom.pdf

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David

[Guy]

How does Zoom write the files? Is it possible to emmulate the same process? Maybe an API or the like?

The tags for exclusions should work; however, I like automation better. If I manually add the tags I'm sure one or two will be missed at some point.

[David]

It took us years of development work to get to V4 of Zoom. There is no quick emulation possible. But I am not exactly sure what you want to emulate in any case? There is also no API that solves your problem.

If you have a dymanic site, you should be able to edit your scripts to output the required tags.

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David