moodle/search

2006/07/11
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(Warning: It took me 1900 seconds to index the forum, go make coffee
whilst you wait.)

Forum search functions changed to use 'get_recordset' instead of
'get_records', for speed reasons. This provides a significant improvement,
but indexing is still slow - getting data from the database and Zend's
tokenising _seem_ to be the prime suspects at the moment.

/search/tests/ added - index.php can be used to see which modules are
ready to be included in the search index, and it informs you of any
errors - should be a prerequisite for indexing.

Search result pagination added to query.php, will default to 20 until
an admin page for the search module is written.

2006/07/07
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Search-enabling functions moved out've the mod's lib.php files and into
/search/documents/mod_document.php - this requires the search module to
operate without requiring modification of lib files.

SearchDocument base class improved, and the way module documents extend
it. A custom-data field has been added to allow modules to add any custom
data they wish to be stored in the index - this field is serialised into
the index as a binary field.

Database field 'type' renamed to 'doctype' to match the renaming in the
index, 'type' seems to be a reserved word in Lucene. Several index field
names change to be more descriptive (cid -> course_id). URLs are now
stored in the index, and don't have to be generated on the fly during
display of query results.

2006/07/05
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Started cleaning and standardising things.

cvs v1.1
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This is the initial release (prototype) of Moodle's new search module -
so basically watch out for sharp edges.

The structure has not been finalised, but this is what is working at the
moment, when I start looking at other content to index, it will most likely
change. I don't recommend trying to make your own content modules indexable,
at least not until the whole flow is finalised. I will be implementing the
functions needed to index all of the default content modules on Moodle, so
expect that around mid-August.

Wiki pages were my goal for this release, they can be indexed and searched,
but not updated or deleted at this stage (was waiting for ZF 0.14 actually).

I need to check the PostgreSQL sql file, I don't have a PG7 install lying
around to test on, so the script is untested.

To index for the first time, login as an admin user and browse to /search/index.php
or /search/stats.php - there will be a message and a link telling you to go index.

-- Michael Champanis (mchampan)
   cynnical@gmail.com
   Summer of Code 2006