Global Search

[Genx]

Anyone have any experience with global search fields... i.e. a search field and a script that will search through all tables for matching text?

Any resources would also be greatly appreciated.

Cheers, Genx

[Ender]

See this:

http://fmforums.com/forum/showtopic.php?tid/171431/post/182657

I've always thought this type of search made little sense, because the context is such an important part of a user's intent when searching. If the user wants to find Employees, they would expect to find them in an Employee layout, if they want to find Products, they would expect to find them in a Products layout.

Perhaps you can share your intent with this type of search. Maybe this makes sense in your case, or maybe there might be a better structure that would work better.

[Genx]

Cheers for the link, ah my intent, well theres different tables that store similar data and it can be a pain searching for a particular person or address if you dont know which table you've stored that person in. Especially in a server environment users can be very difficult and confuse each other when they dont put information in the right sections...

the lines arent always as defining as products and employees, they can tend to be more vague, like buyers, sellers, contacts, vendors etc. all requiring different info to be stored yet all found by a particular persons name or an address etc...

anyway i just figure a global search is the best way to overcome the problem...plus it looks good :.

The reply in the link is good though i may opt to try and make a secondary table which duplicates special types of info in each table as a new record is added... that way the results would be easier to present in a seperate layout... then again i store all the names of people in all tables throughout the database in a related names table anyway so i suppose my global search could just encompass those... i dunno, ill think it through, try it out and if it works for me ill let you know.

Cheers for the reply, Genx

Edited December 14, 2005 by Guest

[Ender]

If your business is such that the same person could be a buyer, seller, contact, and vendor, then you might consider a structure where all of those are combined into the same table. They could still be filtered by which type(s) they are, and additional tables used for the bits of data that are exclusive to one type or another. This would make your search a simple matter.

[Genx]

... but the information required for each is completely different, and isnt the idea to keep each table as simple as possible in order to increase eficiency? I mean 50 unnecessary fields for a buyer that are required for sellers cant possibly be good... in any language

[Ender]

I was thinking those things that are common (which are also probably the things you'd want to do this search on,) would be in this common table (name, address, etc.,) and those 50 other things could be in attached tables. Showing the right fields from these attached tables is a matter of interface design.

I'm not saying this is the best structure for your data, since I don't know anything about your business requirements. I'm just giving you another option to consider.

[Genx]

Yeah i can see what your saying, it seems fairly logical in structure... ill try it in my next project, cheers Ender...

Genx