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

[Chris Hansen]

Adding to Webko's excellent thoughts, about optimization, you might also consider using SetDBData's fourth parameter to specify a return layout:

SetDBData ($database, $layout, $groupSize, $responseLayout)

That way, you could optimize both search, and display.  You could even use some of PHP's nice text parsing to replace the search term in those returned results with a highlighted version thereof...

Just some more thoughts...

--Chris

On Mar 27, 2012, at 5:47 PM, Tim 'Webko' Booth wrote:

> 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
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