htsearch
ht://Dig Copyright © 1995-2000 The ht://Dig Group
Please see the file COPYING for
license information.
HTML Form
The primary interface to htsearch is through an HTML form.
When the form is submitted, the htsearch program will take
values from the form and perform the actual search. The
search can be modified in many ways with either hidden input
fields or other HTML form tags. Study the examples to get a
feel of what things are possible.
The HTML form is expected to contain at least an input text
field named words. This is where the user will enter
the search words. Other values are also recognized but have
appropriate defaults in case they are not used:
-
config
-
Specifies the name of the configuration file. The name here
is the name without the path and without the .conf
at the end. This file is assumed to be located in the
CONFIG_DIR directory. Periods are not allowed in this
field for security reasons (to prevent HTML authors from
pointing all around at your files).
The default is htdig
-
exclude
-
This value is a pattern that all URLs of the search results
cannot match. This pattern may include regular
expressions when enclosed within [ and ] characters.
The default is blank.
-
format
-
This specifies the name of the template to display the
search results in. There are two builtin templates named
builtin-long and builtin-short which can be
used, but any number of custom templates can also be
defined. Find out more about the templates in the
Output Templates section.
The format value can be specified as either a
hidden input field or a drop down menu.
The default is specified by the template_name
attribute in the configuration file.
-
keywords
-
Used to specify a list of required words that have to be in
the documents. This list of words is added to the normal
words value using logical "and"s, or logical "or"s
if the any_keywords
attribute is set to true in the configuration file.
An example use for this value is to make it a drop down
menu with a limited set of predetermined categories or
keywords to restrict the search. This can be very useful
for very structured pages.
Note that the words may appear anywhere in the document.
The scope of these required words is not limited to
words in META tags with the "keywords" or "htdig-keywords"
property, despite what the parameter name may suggest.
-
matchesperpage
-
Specifies how many matches will be displayed on each page
of results.
The default is specified by the matches_per_page
attribute in the configuration file. Since this value has
to be a number, it either needs to be set using a hidden
input field or a with a drop down menu.
-
method
-
This can be one of and, or, or
boolean. It determines what type of search will be
performed.
The default is specified by the match_method
attribute in the configuration file. It is quite useful to
make this item a drop down menu so the user can select the
type of search at search time.
-
page
-
This should normally not be used. It is generated by the
paged results display.
-
restrict
-
This value is a pattern that all URLs of the search results
will have to match. This can be used to restrict the search
to a particular subtree or subsection of a bigger
database. The pattern may include regular expressions
when the expression is enclosed by [ and ] characters.
The default is blank.
-
sort
-
This can be one of score, time, date,
title, revscore, revtime, revdate,
or revtitle. It determines what type of sort will be
performed on the search results. The types time and
date are synonymous, as are revtime and
revdate, as all four sort on the time that the
documents were last modified, if this information is given
by the server.
The sort methods that begin with rev simply reverse
the order of the sort.
The default is specified by the sort
attribute in the configuration file. It is quite useful to
make this item a drop down menu so the user can select the
type of sort at search time.
Last modified: $Date: 2000/04/11 03:18:01 $