[Zope-dev] Re: Catalog Bugs?

[Casey Duncan]

(continuing discussion on zope-dev)

I am to blame for those changes which were motivated by the addition of a bunch of new indexes. The most significant of which is ZCTextIndex which has its own brand new kind of "Vocabulary" object (called a Lexicon, which is what the old thing actually was). We tried to use the old one or develop a compatible one, but it was beyond saving, even its API blew. Its one the worst pieces of cruft in Zope IMHO.

That is why a vocabulary is no longer created. Also, the Catalog used to have a hand in managing the vocabulary (basically locating it for textindexes), this behavior harkens back to before plug-in indexes and was actually horribly broken, so I ripped it out.

The other problem was that creating default indexes in the Catalog, although perhaps convenient for newbies, gets in the way much of the time. I found myself creating catalogs programmatically and then clearing out all the indexes and adding different ones all the time. Also, a few indexes namely summary and bobobase_modification_time were actually broken and/or useless. The latter is not something the application should use as an index source as many have discovered. Many of these indexes were also not useful in the CMF.

Now this is not to say that adding some default indexes (as an option on catalog creation) would not be useful. Here are some suggestions:

id                     FieldIndex
title                  ZCTextIndex
meta_type              FieldIndex
path	               PathIndex
PrincipiaSearchSource  ZCTextIndex

Granted these are much the same as before minus a few. It would also create a ZCTextIndex Lexicon named "Lexicon" in the catalog for you and bind the text indexes to it.

How does that sound? Anybody else want to suggest index possibilities?

-Casey


On Tue, 15 Oct 2002 07:02:36 -0400
Luke Tymowski <luke@seeto.com> wrote:

> Hello Casey,
> 
> > Just noticed that you said that you thought the Catalog was broken in
> > 2.6.0b2. What is the problem you found? Is it in the collector?
> 
> Previously, before 2.6.0, when you created a new search engine or 
> catalog, inside the catalog Zope would create for you a Vocabulary, 
> Indexes, and Metadata with default values. You could add to the 
> defaults. But the default was usable and you simply created search and 
> results forms.
> 
> Now when you create a catalog you have to create the Vocabulary, 
> Indexes, and Metadata by hand. Then create the search and results forms 
> or use the "wizard" to create them for you.
> 
> It's not a big deal for someone who is used to Zope, but for newbies 
> it's v difficult to get them up and running with a search engine - and 
> it was one of the beauties of Zope - you had a search engine built-in 
> that was just about ready to go, making it a much less frustrating 
> experience for newbies.
> 
> Maybe I'm doing something wrong.
> 
> Luke
>