Newbie Questions - Excel indexing & links to parent docu

[Bobomo]

If I have a page up with links to .xls files, will it search those files also or just the page itself?

Sorry, I'm a newbie.

[David]

It will search XLS files if all these points are true,

1) You have specified .XLS as a file type to be indexed

2) You have the Excel plug-in installed. See, http://www.wrensoft.com/zoom/plugins.html

3) You are using the Standard or Pro edition of Zoom. (Not the free edition)

4) The Excel files are not encrypted and contain some text or numbers (not just images or diagrams).

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David

[Bobomo]

Ok! I have purchased the Pro version of zoom and after fixing some of my own errors it now searches thru my xls files quite well.

Now for my next question.

The results zoom returns link directly to the file. Is there a way to make zoom list the html page that contains the link to the xls file instead of the actual file itself?

[Ray]

The results zoom returns link directly to the file. Is there a way to make zoom list the html page that contains the link to the xls file instead of the actual file itself?

No. At least, not without regular post-processing of results or additional script modifications.

[Bobomo]

Ouch!

Is there a guide on what type of script modifacations would need to be made in order to achieve this?

Thanks for all your help!!

[David]

You are asking for Zoom to link to the parent document but not the document itself. The problems are,

1) Zoom doesn't store information about links between parent and child pages in the index. It has not been required in the past and would take up unnecesary space.

2) There can be many (even hundreds) of links to the child document. So which parent URL shoud be displayed?

3) There could be other complications, like what URL is returned for the child of a child if the child URL itself should never be returned.

So to get something working how you want, possible solutions are,

a) Do a server side re-direct to the parent document when users access the Excel file with an invalid refering URL

b) Manually edit the zoom_pages.zdat file after each indexing session. Changing URLs as required.

c) Write a program to automatically post process the zoom_pages.zdat in a manner similar to b)

d) Extract an abstract from the Excel file (all the keywords) and place it on the parent page. Then don't index the Excel file, just index the parent page with the abstract.

e) You modify the search script to transform the URLs being outputed during a search to the correct URLs. What is actually required would depend on the structure of your site. This would probably only work if you have a structured site.

In short, there are solutions, but not easy solutions.

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David