Commit 786545da authored by Hanno Schlichting's avatar Hanno Schlichting

Remove inline tutorial, this is better covered in...

Remove inline tutorial, this is better covered in http://docs.zope.org/zope2/zope2book/SearchingZCatalog.html
parent 88d8a4bf
ZCatalog Tutorial
This document provides a tutorial for 'ZCatalog', the new search
engine machinery in Zope. The audience for the document is content
managers.
Contents
o What is it? What's it for? Why's it so cool?
o ZCatalog Objects
o Example using ZCatalog
o Creating Search Forms And Result Reports
o Using ZCatalog In A Zope Site
o ZCatalog vs. Catalog
What is it? What's it for? Why's it so cool?
The 'ZCatalog' provides powerful indexing and searching on a Zope
database using a Zope management interface. A 'ZCatalog' is a
Zope object that can be added to a Folder, managed through the
web, and extended in many ways.
The 'ZCatalog' is a very significant project, providing a number
of compelling features:
o **Searches are fast**. The data structures used by the index
provide extremely quick searches without consuming much memory.
o **Searches are robust**. The 'ZCatalog' supports boolean
search terms, proximity searches, synonyms and stopwords.
o **Indexing is wildly flexible**. A 'ZCatalog' can catalog
custom properties and track unique values. Since 'ZCatalog'
catalogs objects instead of file handles, you can index any
content that can have a Python object wrapped around it. This
also lets objects participate in how they are cataloged,
e.g. de-HTML-ifying contents or extracting PDF properties.
o **Usable outside of Zope**. The software is broken into a
Python 'Catalog' which wrapped by a 'ZCatalog'. The Python
'Catalog' can be used in any Python program; all it requires is
the Z object database and the indexing machinery from Zope.
o **Transactional**. An indexing operation is part of a Zope
transaction. If something goes wrong after content is indexed,
the index is restored to its previous condition. This also means
that Undo will restore an index to its previous condition.
Finally, a 'ZCatalog' can be altered privately in a Version,
meaning no one else can see the changes to the index.
o **Cache-friendly**. The index is internally broken into
different "buckets", with each bucket being a separate Zope
database object. Thus, only the part of the index that is needed
is loaded into memory. Alternatively, an un-needed part of the
index can be removed from memory.
o **Results are lazy**. A search that returns a tremendous
number of matches won't return a large result set. Only the
part of the results, such as the second batch of twenty, are
returned.
The 'ZCatalog' is a free, Open Source part of the Zope software
repository and thus is covered under the same license as Zope. It
is being developed in conjunction with the Zope Portal Toolkit
effort. However, the 'ZCatalog' product is managed as its own
module in CVS.
ZCatalog Objects
A 'ZCatalog' performs two activities: indexing information and
performing searches.
Most the work is done in the first step, which is getting objects
into the index. This is done in two ways. First, if your objects
are ZCatalog-aware they automatically update the index when they
are added, edited or directly deleted. *Directly deleted* means
the object was deleted from a Folder, not the deletion of a
containing Folder.
The second way that site contents get updated is by "finding"
information "into" the 'ZCatalog'. An operation based on Zope's
Find view traverses Folders looking for objects matching the
criterion. The objects are then registered with the Catalog.
Objects in the index but no longer in the site are removed from
the Catalog.
Either way -- automatically updating or walking the Folders --
'ZCatalog' indexes the objects it finds. The 'ZCatalog' is set up
to look for properties, each of which are added to the index.
There are two kinds of indexes, called FieldIndex and TextIndex.
FieldIndex indexes treat data atomically. The entire contents of a
FieldIndex-indexed property is treated as a unit. With a
TextIndex index, it is broken into words which are indexed
individually. A TextIndex is also known as *full-text index*.
Note that the 'ZCatalog' doesn't track ZCatalog-unaware objects
after it has indexed them. This means that the 'ZCatalog' must
reindex its objects occasionally when the objects have been
changed. Out of date indexes can be prevented by inheriting from
a ZCatalog-aware class which can tell the 'ZCatalog' to reindex it
whenever a change is made. Just such a class will be included
with the Portal toolkit.
ZCatalogs are "searchable objects", meaning they cooperate with Z
Search Interfaces. Creating a search form for a 'ZCatalog' is a
simple matter of adding a Z Search Interface from the management
screen and filling in a form. ZCatalogs can also be queried directly
from DTML, as shown in the example below.
Using 'ZCatalog' In A Zope Site
The 'ZCatalog' provides high-speed access to what is on your site.
Thus, the 'ZCatalog' can be used to re-engineer the way your site
is laid out.
For instance, a Slashdot-style presentation is simple. Just
insert some DTML that asks the 'ZCatalog' for recent items.
Alternatively, a Site Map is nothing more than presenting the
contents of the catalog. A page with tree-based browsing of
software packages by category is also easy. Perhaps you'd like to
provide a link that lists all the packages the current user has
authored.
Thus, the 'ZCatalog' isn't just about searching. It can be used
as the DTML-scriptable engine for browsing a site as well.
Since the 'ZCatalog' is a normal Zope folderish object, you can
also create DTML Methods inside it to present the catalog
contents. For instance, perhaps you'd like to dump the contents
of the site as an RDF stream, or do content syndication with RSS.
These are just DTML Methods that change the 'Content-Type:' and
send back XML. All without actually waking up any of the content
objects in the site.
ZCatalog vs. Catalog
The real star of this package is the 'Catalog' module. All the
heavy lifting is done by 'Catalog'. 'ZCatalog' is basically a
Zope-aware wrapper around Catalog, which can be used on it's own
outside the Zope framework. The only requirement is that you are
using ZODB as your object store.
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