[FX.php List] Google-type search across tables?

[Tim 'Webko' Booth]

Dear Joel,
>
> I've thought of concatenated fields, but the client wants to search  
> on some "description" fields containing lots of text, and I'm  
> concerned that that might really slow things down.

It would have to be fairly massive slabs of text to slow it down  
appreciably in my experience. Especially if you tune the layout to  
only have the search field on it.
>
> I was thinking of multiple searches because they'd like the results  
> to be filterable by category.

That's where overhead issues start coming into play - as everything is  
returned in the rather wordy FileMaker XML format and each search is  
run one after the other, lots of little searches become inefficient. I  
notice this particularly on one system where I can have over 50 new  
record or edit record requests.
>
> By "extend that for related tables", do you mean have one  
> concatenated field in the parent table including child fields/ 
> records?  Or something else?

The first. As I said, then the issue becomes identifying where the  
actual match came from...

Cheers

Webko