by External Poster » Thu Jan 30, 2014 12:02 pm
This posting is from: annie
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> If it's not too much trouble, a Search box feature would be helpful
> for this MyDLV Discussion forum.
Here's the story on doing a search function ...
The phpBB system, which we use for the forum section here, does have a
very good and efficient search function. For MyDLV it's turned off, but
could be turned on if some programming is done to make it work
correctly.
Simply turning it on would result in most searches failing to work as
expected.
The Readers Digest version is that the utility that does the gatewaying
from external RFC (2)822 messages to the internal phpBB posts (YbToss)
does not populate two tables which are used in the search function.
Here's the War And Peace version ... :)
Sorry if this is too technical for some. Feel free to skip. :)
The back end of phpBB is a fairly complex relational database. Most
phpBB implementations use MySQL but this particular one uses Postgres,
which is better for phpBB instances which generate extremely large
tables, such as this one.
Every meaningful word in every post entered via the web phpBB interface
is placed into the table (relation) phpbb_search_wordlist plus a second
table, phpbb_search_wordmatch records which words appear in which posts
plus a flag to indicate when the word appears in the post title.
Getting things to work right would involve two projects:
1. Extending YbToss so it properly populates the phpbb_search_wordlist
and phpbb_search_wordmatch tables when it inserts new external posts.
2. Parsing the meaningful words from the existing 7000 or so external
posts and populating the phpbb_search_wordlist and phpbb_search_wordmatch
tables as apporpriate with the words and the posts containing them.
If there's a desire for this, yes, this could be done, but would need to
be an "off season" project as we're kind of in a systems "freeze" here
as we approach our crunch time.
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(This posting was entered by annie, an external user of MyDLV.)