[sword-devel] search idea

Trevor Jenkins sword-devel@crosswire.org
Sun, 26 Dec 1999 13:51:59 +0000


On Sunday, 26 December, 1999 08:04:30, Troy A. Griffitts 
<scribe@crosswire.org> wrote:

> Great ideas for features.

I've been giving "my" requirements a little more thought between opening
presents and huge mouthfuls of turkey and Christmas pudding. :-) I know that
I am biased in what I want; I've been spoilt during the last 20+ years in
having commerical software that gave me all the features that I wanted. I am
now so used to those features that I expect them to be available everywhere
else.

>  The place to start looking would be in class
> SWModule.  This is the base class for all SWORD modules and contains the
> very basic search logic.

Thanks for the pointer I was struggling through all the source modules
trying to find where it all starts. (I'm not a native C++ programmer,
Simula-67, Algol-68, Bliss and teco are my real loves.) Now I see what SWORD
provides and how much my experience of text retrieval is needed. :-)
Currently I can get regular expressions or phrases or multiword searches.
Whereas, of course, I want all those combined into one search system. :-|

>  To include extra index searching into the API,
> you should probably, initially, try subclassing class RawText

With this "starter for ten" I can see how a different search API can be
incorporated.

> (specifically for Bible texts),

But I shan't be limiting it to Bible texts alone.

> Then, if you think your logic may be generalized for module types other
> than Bibles, we will abstract the search logic into it's own object and
> have SWModule own an instance of a search object newed to a type
> specified in the .conf file.

That's my eventual aim for this work. No matter what type of text is being
manipulated by SWORD the identical search features should be available.

At the moment I putting a specification together. When I've connoceted a
first draft I'll put it around for comments.

> Let me know if you need help with understanding the API.

I'm making headway with it now. :-)

Regards, Trevor

British Sign Language is not inarticulate handwaving; it's a living
language. So recognise it now.

--

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