Searching Product reference

[JMK2]

I have a product reference as follows:

CO-XE113R85

I have 4,000 of them and they all contain at least one "-" some even more. For this particular dataset this field is probably the most important one to be searching on but so far I cannot achieve that end.

If I add the "-" to the word character set in the search settings, and type the entire phrase as above in, it does not return a result. My impression was that by adding that character it would find that phrase.

Bob Ladden was helping me with trying some new strings in the PERL search file itself by stripping the "-" and seeing spaces instead but we didn't have much luck. So now I'm back to trying to get it to recognize the complete product reference, but having no luck there either.

Would appreciate any and all suggestions if anyone has any thoughts on the matter.

[garyhay]

Tom

Can you not use a "Site Search" script rather than the Actinic search or as well as.

Use the actinic one for free text and the other one for product ref

I know a few Actinic sites have used this in the past

http://www.atomz.com/

[JMK2]

Thanks Gary,

That sounds real interesting and I'd love to give it a try. Is that script something you enable or configure in the settings, I'm not to sure where to go about finding and enabling it.

[NormanRouxel]

It works just fine for me on 6.1.3 (once I added - to the start of the search character set). Have you restored your search scripts to the original versions?

Norman

[garyhay]

Download it from the link in my last message. I think norman is saying that the - should be okay

[JMK2]

Norman, no, I hadn't thought of that, Bob's string is still in there, I'll go back and comment it out and see what happens,

Thanks Norman, good point.

Thanks Gary, will also do that.

[NormanRouxel]

Yep. I changed a product reference on my test site to CO-XE113R85 and had no trouble searching for it.

Norman

[JMK2]

Well I went back to remove Bob's suggested string in Search.pm and it was not there. Meaning I must have done it in the wrong folder originally so no wonder his suggestion was not working. So now I'm going to try that frst and see if it works because that solution may be preferable to requiring the strings to have a "-".

But that is even more puzzling then, as my previous search attempts with the "-" should ahve worked if his string was not there.

I'll post back in a bit after I test.

Thanks.

[JMK2]

Yes, once I finally dug up the correct search.pm file and removed the changes we previously made to it, now mine works just like yours. Now that I've got it sorted, I can always go back later and retry Bob's strings and see if I can get them to work and also I can give Gary's script a try. At least the cart is semi functional now in the meantime.

Thanks Norman.

[rmladden]

If you try my line again, be sure to put it after the line:
# Split words on the same boundaries as the C++ does
Not where I originally said to put it.

Try testing with only a few products. Then try with 4000. I'm not sure Actinic's index can handle that many.

There are a few services that will provide site search for you. See http://sitelevel.whatuseek.com/
Give it a try to see if they handle the '-' better.

[JMK2]

Thanks Bob,

That's in fact where the line was, but I noticed that the other original line we tried before was also still there in the other section. So you think that the two of them may have been having trouble getting along?

You'll recall that I had to do an Actinic install into VMware because I suspected I had a corrupt install on my system. Well it turns out I forgot that I had done that so for a while I was actually randomly modifying 2 search.pm files instead of one. That would have been good for some schizophrenic behaviour for sure. Now that I have it at least functioning I'll be free to try and fine tune it better.

It's been interesting. This is the third cart I've worked with (the first I wrote myself in Cold Fusion and still use on a couple of simple sites). The differences between this type of cart and a Cold Fusion cart like Cartweaver are so immensely different I still have no idea which one I would recommend to someone, but I'm going to have to soon when I meet with a client.

[rmladden]

You've been through a lot. ColdFusion could do the job well too. Not many ISP's offer it because it's not free. I had it crash under load, but I have not tested MX yet.

If you have MySQL or even MS SQL or Orcale data bases, you can copy the Catalog Section and Product tables to the server and write your own product search function pretty easily.

[JMK2]

Interesting you should mention that. There is an interesting thread (in fact more than one) right now in the Cartweaver Newsgroup about setting up and running MS SQL (support.dwfaq.com). For anyone considering it there are some good tips in there from Lawrence, the deleloper of Cartweaver. He highly recommends it, especially for those currently using Access. I must admit with the size our source files are growing so it looks more attractive all the time. I'm fortunate in that there are in-house servers here (running Cold Fusion MX) so I don't have to deal with an ISP to set things up for us, and even though you do not need to use Cold Fusion to run Actinic, Cold Fusion is still intergral to the way the site works so the Actinic pages I've been developing all run in a Cold Fusion site. What I think would be nice would be if Actinic added support for .cfm so you could use things like CFinclude tags within the templates, now that would be real sweet as my teenage son would say. All it would take would be an option to generate pages from the templates as .cfm instead of .htm and then the CF tags would work.

[rmladden]

ColdFusion's strongest function is data base interfacing. Just put SQL in a cfquery tag and you get the rows you can cfloop through. Setting up MS SQL is easy (I say it is easier than Oracle). If you got all of that, that is the way to go. ColdFusion supports Access databases as well, but don’t load it to hard.