CD with custom search fields possible?

[Sue]

I need to create a CD/DVD with probably a couple of thousand PDFs.

They will all have document summary information (and if I can manage it, additional info as well).

The users of the cd won't be search savvy, so I need to know if I can customise the main search page to include separate search fields for author, title, subject (and perhaps the other doc info fields) etc.

If this is possible, will it be necessary to create a "mydocument.pdf.desc" for each file (eek!) and can this be automated?

[Sue]

Ah, when all else fails, read the manual......

It seems I may be out of luck on just about all counts. Can someone confirm this please?

thanks,

[Ray]

Hi Sue,

You can enable "Use meta information from plugins" in the "Scan Options" tab of the configuration window.

This will extract document summary information such as Title, Subject, Keywords, and Author from PDF files. If you wish to include the latter, be sure to also check "Author" in the "Indexing Options" tab of the config window.

However, the above will not allow you to have seperate search fields per item, and you will not be able to restrict searches to a certain field. That is, if you search for "Bob", you will get results for files which may have an Author field of Bob, as well as files which refer to Bob in the page content. To do something like this, you would have to modify the search script.

[zqqz]

Has there been any upgrades on this front? I also have this requirement. It would be great to be able to limit searches to titles for example or be able to sort results by date as well as relevance, not to mention date limited searching. I know this would be fairly tough to implement so I wonder about workarounds.

For those of us using mysql back ends, would there be a way to do the field searches against the mysql table, which should be very fast, and then combine those with any fulltext search done in zoom?

[David]

There was a date sorting feature implemented in V4.0.

You can limit search by titles by not indexing page content. But to have it as a search form option that can be selected by the web site user, would require script customisation. As would searching by date range.

Doing direct searching of SQL databases and merging results just doesn't make any practical sense.

A more sensible and practical solution to database searching is described here,
http://www.wrensoft.com/zoom/support/faq_howto.html#sql

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David