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CGI-Application-Search-1.14
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/ CGI::Application::Search::Tutorial

NAME

CGI::Application::Search::Tutorial - How do we use this thing?

DESCRIPTION

Need information on how to setup Swish-e for use with CGI::Application::Search?

Need more information on using the AJAX capabilities of CGI::Application::Search?

Then you've come to the right place

BRIEF SWISH-E TUTORIAL

You can skip this section if you're a Swish-e veteran. Otherwise, read on for a step-by-step guide to adding a search interface to your site using CGI::Application::Search.

Step 1: Install Swish-e

The first thing you need to do is install Swish-e. First, download it from the swish-e site:

http://swish-e.org

Then unpack it, cd into the directory, build and install:

tar zxf swish-e-2.4.3.tar.gz
cd swish-e-2.4.3
./configure
make
make install

You'll also need to build the Perl module, SWISH::API, which this module uses:

cd perl
perl Makefile.PL
make
make install

Step 2: Setup a Config File

The first step to setting up a swish-e search engine is writing a config file. Swish-e supports a smorgasborg of configuration options but just a few will get you started.

# index all HTML files in /path/to/index
IndexDir /path/to/index
IndexOnly .html .htm
IndexContents HTML2 .html .htm

# C::A::Search needs a description, use the first 1,500 characters
# of the body
StoreDescription HTML2 <body> 1500

# remove doc-root path so links will work on the results page
ReplaceRules remove /path/to/index

Put the above in a file called swish-e.conf.

NOTE: The above is a very simple swish-e.conf file. To bask in the power and flexibility that is swish-e, please see the official documentation.

Step 3: Run the Indexer

Now that you've got a basic configuration file you can index your site. The corresponding simple command is:

$ swish-e -v 1 -c swish-e.conf -f /path/to/swishe-index

The last part is the place where Swish-e will write its index. It should be the name of a file in a directory writable by you and readable by your CGI scripts.

Later you'll need to setup the indexer to run from cron, but for now just run it once.

Swish-e has a command-line interface to running searches which you can use to confirm that your index is working. For example, to search for "foo":

$ swish-e -w foo -f /path/to/swishe-index

If that works you should see some hits (assuming your site contains "foo").

Step 5: Setup an Instance Script

Like all CGI::Application modules, CGI::Application::Search requires an instance script. Create a file called 'search.pl' or 'search.cgi' in a place where your web server will execute it. Put this in it:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use CGI::Application::Search;
my $app = CGI::Application::Search->new(
  PARAMS => { SWISHE_INDEX => '/path/to/index' }
);
$app->run();

Now make it executable:

$ chmod +x search.pl

Step 6: Test Your Instance Script

First, test it on the command-line:

$ ./search.pl

That should show you the HTML for the search form with no results. Now try it in your browser:

http://yoursite.example.com/search.pl

If that doesn't work, check your error log. Do not email me or the CGI::Application mailing list until you check your error log. Yes, I mean you. Thanks.

Step 7: Rejoice

You've just completed the world's easiest search system setup! Now go setup that indexing cronjob.

AJAX USAGE

CGI::Application::Search provides 2 features implemented in AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript And XML). These are:

Only the relevant portions of the page are changed, not the entire page. This results in a faster search, especially if the page is surrounded by other dynamic elements (navigation, side bars, etc).

Auto-Suggest

As the user types, they are presented with suggestions that match the letters/words they have entered so far.

Both are configurable and overrideable and can also be turned off completely. Both make use of the Prototype and Scriptaculous JavaScript libraries (available at http://prototype.conio.net/ and http://script.aculo.us).

Although our example AJAX templates have these libraries included (using HTML::Prototype->define_javascript_functions() we recommend that you actually download these libraries yourself and put them into your web document tree and reference them in <script> tags. This will allow them to be cached by the browser instead of reparsed on each page fetch.

<script src="/prototype.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script src="/scriptaculous.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

You are encouraged to look at the sample templates included with this distribution while you are learning how the JavaScript, CSS, <forms> and links all work together.

This is fairly straight forward. All form submissions and all links are converted into calls to the Ajax.Updater() method instead.

Form submissions will be serialized into query strings, and both links and form submissions will be sent to the server. What ever the server sends back will just replace the contents of the <div> with the id of 'search_listing'. And while the browser waits for the response, the 'search_listing' div is replaced by a simple message.

<div id="search_listing"></div>

<script type="text/javascript">
<!--
    new Ajax.Updater(
        'search_listing',
        url,
        {
            parameters: query,
            asynchronous: 1,
            onLoading: function(request) {
                $('search_listing').innerHTML = "<strong>" + msg + " ...</strong>";
            }
        }
    );
-->
</script>

You can use the same template for both the inital request to view the full search page (with search form) and to just return the Non-Refresh search results. Simply use the 'ajax' flag to determine what to show when. See the sample templates (templates/ajax_search_results.tmpl and templates/ajax_search_results.tt) for examples.

After you have added the appropriate <div> and Javascript, then simple set the AJAX config parameter to true in your CGI::Application::Search's params.

SETTING UP AUTO-SUGGEST

By default, the AUTO-SUGGEST feature will use a simple flat file that contains the words to suggest, in alphabetical order, one word per line. You can specify the file (AUTO_SUGGEST_FILE) and whether or not the application should cache the values it pulls from the file (AUTO_SUGGEST_CACHE) which is useful if the file only contains a few thousand words and you're in a persistent environment.

You can also specify the maximum number of suggestions that can be sent to the user at a given time (AUTO_SUGGEST_LIMIT). This is useful to not only speed i up the suggestions, but also keeps from overwhelming the use.

A common use-case is to suggest words that are known to exist in the Swish-e index. After your index has been set up, it's pretty trivial to extract all of the words that exist into a separate file perfect for use as an AUTO_SUGGEST_FILE.

This command will create an alphabetical listing of every word in your documents that has at least 2 alphabetical characters.

# in bash
swish-e -T INDEX_WORDS_META -f swishe.index \
    | grep -o -P "^\S+"  \
    | grep -P "[a-z]{2}" \
 > auto_suggest_file

Then in your template, you have to make sure that an Ajax.Autocompleter() which will watch the form input in question and send the requests to the search app (for the 'suggestions' run mode) and then show the user those suggestions.

<script type="text/javascript">
<!--
    var url = '<tmpl_var url>';
    new Ajax.Autocompleter( 
        'keywords', 
        'keywords_auto_complete', 
        url, 
        { parameters: "rm=suggestions"  }
    )
//-->
</script>

Next, make sure that you have the appropriate <div> in your HTML to contain those suggestions (most likely immediately below the form input). It would also probably be desireable to turn the browser's built-in auto-completion off for this field.

<input type="text" name="keywords" id="keywords" autocomplete="off" />
<div class="auto_complete" id="keywords_auto_complete"></div>

The last step is to make sure that you have the appropriate CSS styles defined so that your auto-suggested results can be shown in the client. The easiest to get these CSS rules is from HTML::Prototype. Take the output from the following command, paste it into your templates and customize to match your look and feel.

perl -MHTML::Prototype -e 'print HTML::Prototype->auto_complete_stylesheet . "\n"';

AUTHOR

Michael Peters <mpeters@plusthree.com>

Thanks to Plus Three, LP (http://www.plusthree.com) for sponsoring my work on this module.

CONTRIBUTORS

Sam Tregar <sam@tregar.com>