Quick Search box

[Joelsim]

Hi, I'm new to the forum and setting up a new website.

I was wondering if anyone knows how I can get the search to work for various things.

I'll be selling headphones and want search to work with and without spaces as I think customers will use both ways, for example.

Beyerdynamic name their products with spaces

Beyerdynamic MMX 101 iE

But some customers may type
MMX101IE

Does anyone know how I can make this work? At the moment the search only seems to work if you type the exact correct nomenclature.

Thanks

Joel

[NormanRouxel]

Welcome to the Community, Joel.

The search indexes are built by Catalog.exe and it's not going to be possible to alter that behaviour. The search matching is done by Perl on the server and you're going to need significant Perl skills to alter that and see below for pitfalls in concatenating search terms.

Other routes would be to customise the search form with some added JavaScript so that just before it's submitted some extra terms would be added, created by concatenating the customer entered ones. However this leads to the problem that in your example above, you wouldn't want "Beyerdynamic" concatenated with "MMX" and since customers can enter words in any order you can't really make automatic rules about what should / should not be concatenated.

One way that will work would be to use the Extended Information text to contain the words you want to match on. If you don't use the Extended Info capability, you can still enter words into the Text field there and they will be indexed (if you enable such indexing via Settings / Search Settings / Indexing Options). This is also useful if you want to include common misspellings without showing them to the customer.

[Joelsim]

Thanks very much for your help Norman (you did some coding for me through Jonathan recently as it happens).

I'll give the extended info box a try.

Thanks

Joel

[Joelsim]

Norman, that works a treat. Thanks very much.