Re: Some questions about search-related tags

[mike@minivend.com]

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Quoting Kris Kelley (sysadmin@jahoopa.com):
> ******    message to minivend-users from "Kris Kelley" <sysadmin@jahoopa.com>     ******
> 
> In the example catalog "simple", this tag appears in the search 
> results template page (results.html):
> 
> [search-region send=1]
> 
> What does the "send" parameter do?  I looked through the search 
> documentation but wasn't able to find anything on it.  The "send" 
> parameter is also used in a [page] tag farther down in results.html, 
> but again I didn't see any documentation about it.

The send parameter works in conjunction with a non-parsed-header
vlink/tlink to send data before all of the results are in.

This is useful for very large database searches, as the page build
time can get large. If you don't put all results in a table (which 
will slow things down as Netscape won't display a table until all rows
are in) then you can display the results as they are built. Also,
putting send=1 in the search-region tag sends the start of the page
before the search even starts, so you get instantaneous response
when clicking.

You will notice at the very snappy catalog sites (like Amazon) they
do this to make response seem very fast while they are still searching
the very large database. That is why they don't use tables.

Brian Bullen suggested this; he was doing searches on a million-item-plus
database and it could take a long time to start returning the keys.  I had
for a long time been looking for a way to make MV be usable in nph- mode,
and when I figured that out it all began to work.

> 
> Also, the documentation mentions that the [search-region] tag is used 
> to create a search and display the search results within another page.  
> Since this is the page for displaying search results, I'm getting the 
> impression that this page is taking the search parameters and 
> performing the search again, then displaying the results.  This seems 
> redundant.  Was this meant to be just an example of how
> [search-region] works or is there some advantage to setting up the 
> results page this way?

Actually, the search-region will ignore any arguments if the page
has been used as the target for another search. Basically, that means
that if you put some arguments in and the page is called directly,
the search arguments will be used for the search. If it is called
as a result of a search (like for the more-list function) then they
will be ignored and the search-list used for building the passed search.
This allows the same page to be used to both initiate the search and
to display the subsequent pages for [more].

I don't think my statements above are very clear, but it works. 8-)

-- 
Mike Heins                          http://www.minivend.com/  ___ 
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