findinsite-js field searches

Introduction

Information about a file (or parts of a file) is called meta-data. For example, the HTML TITLE tag defines meta-data for a web page - a "title" field. Similarly, this HTML can be used to define an "author" field for a page:

<meta name="author" content="Chris Cant" />

findinsite-js indexes this information, so it will be found by an ordinary search. See here for details of what fields are found. The RDF/XML plug-in is not currently supported.

You can also set up field search forms so that users can only search the required fields, eg search for author "Cant".

Field search

The standard findinsite-js form can be extended to search specific fields, as shown by the following example.

Fields must be specified by form elements whose names start with fld_. For example, a search of the "author" field should be specified by an INPUT element named fld_Author. The letter case of the element name does not matter. Other form element tags can be used, eg BUTTON, SELECT/OPTION and TEXTAREA.

findinsite-js will report an error if a field does not exist in the search database.

<form method="get" action="/findinsitejs/search">
  Search for:	<input name="Text" type="text" size="30" maxlength="80" /><br />
  Keywords:	<input name='fld_Keywords' type="text" size="30" maxlength="80" /><br />
  Language:	<select name="fld_lang" multiple size="3">
		  <option value="*" selected>Any
		  <option value="en">English
		  <option value="zh">Chinese
		  <option value="zh TW">Chinese Traditional
		  <option value="de">German
		  <option value="ja">Japanese
		</select> 
		<input name="cs" type="hidden" value="UTF-8" />
		<input type="submit" value="Search" />
</form>

Try an online version of this form, searching the phdcc site:

The search terms are shown in the top and bottom template using the %SEARCH_TEXT% and %FIELDS_TEXT% template variables. Examples:

User input	Displayed output	Template variable
Find	Find	%SEARCH_TEXT%
Keywords field: search Language field: English and Chinese	[keywords:search] [lang:en zh]	%FIELDS_TEXT%