[Zope] Something odd about ZCatalog...

Michel Pelletier michel@digicool.com
Sat, 11 Sep 1999 13:06:53 -0400


Kuraiken wrote:
> 
> Hello folks,
> 
> I'm just reporting some general weirdness with ZCatalog.
> 
> I'm sure by now almost everyone has tried the CD class and catalog, right?
> Okay, I just so happen to have a CD titled "For You For Me".
> 
> ZCatalog did not like it. Searching finds no entry with that data. I tried "Dare
> to Dream" and it works on words "dare" and "dream"...but not "to".
> 
> (Yes, in all cases they are strings - textindex)
> 
> So I thought...maybe it's the title - some strange restriction...I tried in
> other fields (eg. artist) and still...nada.
> 
> I have found that ZCatalog does not like the words: for, you, me, to. Why? Are
> these somehow special words? Searching for these words fail everytime.
 
The answer is simple; ZCatalog doesn't like your taste in music.

Seriously, 'you', 'me' and 'for' are stopwords.  They're frequency in
the english languge is so common that searching for them would return te
majority of a document 'corpus'.  Given that you are using titles, in
which each word is more 'important' that those of a document this is a
mis-feature for you.

> Also, ZCatalog-aware does not seem to update the catalog properly. A manual
> "update catalog" is still needed.

Are you sure 'CatalogAwareness' is the first base class for your ZClass?

> Has anyone else encountered these problems? I tried other classes (non CD) and I
> get the same weirdness...ZCatalog cannot search for those words above. (there
> might well be more "phantom" words about...)
> 
> Could it be that ZCatalog considers words of less than 4 letters..."non words"?

Not necesarrily, but it does consider one letter words as stopwords. 
This kinda kicks ya when try and search for anyone with 'C' programming
experience.

The solution to all of these problems is for us to impliment some kind
of vocabulary object which allows you to beter control the vocabulary
that the catalog uses.

-Michel