[Mycroft] 2 kinds of questions

[Matthew A. McGuigan]

Matt Price wrote:

>2) I also finally managed to install the SearchSideBar on firebird
>yesterday (needed root privileges, duuh), and I really like it.  But
>one thing I notice is that the complex bibliographic search engines
>have non-identical boolean syntax -- so it's really hard to combine
>searches in, say, the University of California Library, the Library of
>Congress, and the Harvard library system.  If it were possible to have
>more than one search field -- say, Author, Title, and Subject/Keyword
>-- then combining searches would be much easier.  Writing the search
>plugins wouldn't be that much harder then it is right now, provided
>the Sherlock syntax is flexible enough to allow for multiple user
>inputs.  (Since it's clearly modelled on the HTML "FORM" syntax, I
>imagine this should be possible).  But modifying the code for the
>SideBar might be much more complicated.  Do you have any idea 
>how
>feasible it would be to write a BibSearchSideBar based directly on the
>SearchSideBar code, but adding a couple of extra input fields & maybe
>changing the location of the search plugins?
>
>Anyway, thanks for taking the time out to red my mails!  
>
>matt
>
>
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>  
>
Just forwarding my reply to Matt's question asked on the searchsidebar 
mailing list for discussion here as well.

Matt,

I don't think Sherlock has more than one input, but writing a plugin for 
multiple inputs would seem not that hard.  The core of search services 
would certainly accept the additional input without problem.  Multiple 
search fields on single search likely wouldn't be that hard to make 
possible either, but adding that feature to advanced search 
(multi-search) would take a lot more coding to make possible.  Also, we 
would need to create a new standard for how plugins are supposed to 
define this second field in order to allow plugins to work together in 
multi-search mode.  Even with a new standard for user2, we would for 
obvious reasons need to have some way of defining to the user what each 
field was coded for.  Then we would need to disable the second field 
when two or more plugins that did not match in second field description 
usage were selected for multi-search.  When first field descriptions do 
not match we simply don't show the user what it is defined as.  So, I 
guess my answer is yes, we could conceivably have a user1 and user2 
field, but it would be a lot of coding and I'm not ready to go there 
yet.   If you are interested in doing it yourself, I can look around and 
give you some more specifics of what files would need changing.  I know 
that search-panel.xul is the graphic interface file that would need most 
changes, but you would need to change the core for the new descriptions 
of the field as well.

Regards,

Matthew