[Zope3-dev] Sprintathon: searching?

[Martijn Faassen]

Guido van Rossum wrote:
> > This would be really useful. I'd really like to see a collection of 
> > use-cases that describe concrete examples of the requirements people 
> > have in Zope 2.
> 
> I'm not sure I can help you with that, but I'm an experienced searcher
> (:-), so I can provide typical search scenarios.  Note that
> ZCTextIndex only does full text search -- I personally find other
> kinds of searches much less useful so I tend to focus on full text.

Hm, I'm not sure what this means. Other kinds of searches (like a 
catalog FieldIndex) are definitely important in much application logic.
The use case here is often that the user is not building a search
query directly but that the application is doing a query for the user,
similar to the way SQL queries often aren't directly entered by the user
but are built into the particular application. 

For the end user I do agree full text searches tend to be the most
useful. Anyway, all this doesn't mean you should focus on other kinds
of indexes, I just wanted to make this use case explicit. The current
ZCatalog suffers from trying to accomodate for a human searcher and
programmatic searches both; it's been extended over time from the first
to the second, and it's not pretty. Better would be to have
a core API for programmatic searches with perhaps an adapter on top of it
to help with the common case of human full text searches (if the latter
turns out to be necessary at all).

> > > - I can help with porting ZCTextIndex (which I consider the current
> > >   best practice) to Zope 3.
> > 
> > I think this would be a good task for some people at the sprintathon.

But we certainly wouldn't mind if work started before the sprintathon; the
idea is that we ramp up towards it. :) Lots of the design effort should
take place beforehand.

Regards,

Martijn