Seek greater understanding of search.aspx and ZoomASPX.dll

[mike92117]

Newly purchased, seeking to get up to full speed on this great product. That said, I'm a hardcore C# developer and have some questions regarding the more-or-less "native" dotnet solution that is included.

First of all, what kind of assembly is ZoomASPX.dll? I'm guessing it's not dotnet at all. I can add the assembly but it only seems to put it in the bin folder and is not visible through references. I see the zoomaspx.dll in the BIN folder and it has a dependency on Microsoft.VC90.CRT. C++?

Secondly, the Search.aspx page is a mystery. It references the server control within the form tag, which is runat="server" and has a register statement at the top (but not a page statement). All I want to do is display results on a page derived from a master page in a content section. Of course the masterpage also has a form, runat="server" tag which presents its own problems (nested forms). I'm posting from another page (actually a simple html form in the masterpage outside (above) it's server-side form construct. The html form post contains the query (actually http GET) to search.aspx and this all works fine (I see search results) and shows these on search.aspx. But I think these results should fit into one of my master pages (that has other user controls, etc.) in order to seemlessly blend into the site.

Please help my understand a little deeper as to how this all works and where I have limitations and where I do not.

Thanks kindly,
Mike

[Ray]

Hi Mike,

The ASP.NET Server Control is largely comprised of unmanaged C/C++ code with a managed C# wrapper. The reason for the former is that it shares code with our CGI solution (which is compiled C/C++).

The second reason is that this provides us with the greatest performance and least overhead for the processing heavy task of searching potentially millions of pages.

The "search.aspx" page is really more like an example of how to reference the control in your own page. You just have to register the tagprefix and assembly (see first line) at some point and then have the <ZoomASPX:ASPXSearch ...> tag (see third line) within the form on your page.