Differences between / before and after a directory name

[jfuerwentsches]

Where is the difference in the pattern syntax when I write "/directory" or "/directory/"? Does it change anything within the search operation itself? Thanks.

*edit*
Another question that just came up while working with the search engine. If I create my own search form and submit the search request the word I inserted disapears. Is there a possibility to keep the search word and also the selected category? Is there a pre-defined value for the input forms or something?
*/edit*

Best regards,
Johannes

[Ray]

Where is the difference in the pattern syntax when I write "/directory" or "/directory/"? Does it change anything within the search operation itself?

Are you referring to the start URL or the skip pages list, or the categories list, ... ?

It makes very little difference in the start URL, it just means that the spider will query the server for either a file named "directory" or a folder named "directory" (as it could be either).

In the skip pages and category patterns, it makes a greater difference. These are partial string matches, which means that "/directory" will match both of the following:

/directory/index.html
/directoryspecialpage.html

As you can see, this means that you are not limiting it to a specific directory as you might have intended. If you use "/directory/" then you are limiting it to files under that folder specifically.

Another question that just came up while working with the search engine. If I create my own search form and submit the search request the word I inserted disapears. Is there a possibility to keep the search word and also the selected category? Is there a pre-defined value for the input forms or something?

The default search form that is automatically generated by the search script will maintain the user submitted options across searches.

If you create your own search form, then it will not. If you wish to achieve the same thing on your own form, you would need some additional Javascripting to do this.

[jfuerwentsches]

Thanks for your quick response, Ray.

Are you referring to the start URL or the skip pages list, or the categories list, ... ?

Sorry that I did not make it clear... But I was referring to the categories list and I think your answer served my question well.

If you create your own search form, then it will not. If you wish to achieve the same thing on your own form, you would need some additional Javascripting to do this.

Could you be a bit more pricisly about some additional Javascripting? Is there maybe an example or something?

[Ray]

If you create your own search form, then it will not. If you wish to achieve the same thing on your own form, you would need some additional Javascripting to do this.

Could you be a bit more pricisly about some additional Javascripting? Is there maybe an example or something?

We do not provide this as part of Zoom. If you have chosen to define your own search form, the intention is that it becomes entirely up to the web developer's creation and control. Whether or not (and how) you have Javascript to parse the search query parameters is up to the web developer as well.

There are a few ways you could do this, most likely of which is to parse the parameters from the URL of the current page ("?zoom_query=blah&zoom_page=1..." etc.).

If this is beyond your technical knowledge, we would recommend using the automatically generated search form. This is the default method and will always retain the user submitted search values. This is usually the best way - note that you can customize the generated search form to a great extent via the use of CSS and ZLANG files.
http://www.wrensoft.com/zoom/support/css.html

[jfuerwentsches]

I already figured it out! Thanks a lot for your detailed support.