Site Search with HTDIG - Custom Job (Page 8 of 11 )
ht://Dig allows you to customize both the search form, and the result page generated from a query. In order to demonstrate, I'll create a plain-vanilla search form, called "search.html", which looks like this:
<form method="post" action="/cgi-bin/htsearch">
<input type="text" name="words" size="15">
<input type="submit" value="Begin Search">
</form>
There are a couple of important things to note here. The first is the
ACTION attribute of the <FORM> element, which must point to the "htsearch" utility located in the Web server's CGI directory - you'll remember that this location was specified when configuring the software.
<form method="post" action="/cgi-bin/htsearch">
...
</form>
The second is the search box itself - note that this element must be named "words", so that the "htsearch" utility knows to use the data within it as the search string.
<input type="text" name="words" size="15">
A number of other variables may also be set in this form to control the
behavior of "htsearch" - here's a brief list:
VARIABLE | WHAT IT MEANS |
config | sets the name of the configuration file to use |
matchesperpage | sets number of records per result page |
method | sets type of search (any word, all words, Boolean) |
exclude | if set, excludes URLs matching this pattern from the result
set |
restrict | if set, includes only those URLs matching this pattern in
the result set |
sort | sorting method for result set |
Controlled Behavior
Here's an example:
<form method="post" action="/cgi-bin/htsearch">
<input type="text" name="words" size="15">
<input type="hidden" name="format" value="builtin-long">
<input type="hidden" name="matchesperpage" value="25">
<input type="hidden" name="method" value="and">
<input type="hidden" name="sort" value="score">
<input type="submit" value="Begin Search">
</form>
More information on what these variables mean can be found in the ht://Dig documentation, at http://www.htdig.org/. For a working example, refer to the sample form installed by the software (as discussed on the previous page).
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