Member Avatar for Alicat

Hello,

I need to implement a search feature on a CD that's comprised of html files. The html files contain names of and links to files (Powerpoint, Excel, PDFs, Video). Most of these files are loaded on the CD. Some are accessible only via the internet.

I'd like to have a simple search feature available on each page that would call up file names/links depending upon what's been entered in the search field. I'd also like to have a drop down menu for narrowing the search--so a search field and drop down menu then "submit" button.

It's been awhile since I've created anything like this. I recall having a form that I plugged keywords into that were associated with the PDF, Powerpoint, Excel, etc. files.

Can anyone suggest a straightforward, free way to do this?

Also, I've created the site that will reside on the CD with Dreamweaver MX.

Thanks!!
Alicat

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— the short technical reality is that a static HTML page in a browser cannot scan the whole CD at runtime; 's pointer to packaged indexers is valid. A robust, low-effort approach is to build a search index when you assemble the CD and ship that index with the disc.

Workflow to implement

  • At build time crawl the pages and files and emit a compact index (title, path, type, keywords, and optional extracted text for full-text search). Extract text from PDFs/PPTs with a tool such as Apache Tika or Poppler utilities so those files are searchable.
  • Ship the index as a JSON file or as a small JS file (embedding a window.searchIndex object avoids file:// XHR problems in some browsers).
  • Use a small client-side search library to query and rank results and implement the dropdown filter for file type. Good choices: Lunr.js for inverted-index full-text search, or Fuse.js for lightweight fuzzy matching.
  • Flag remote-only items in the index so the UI can hide or warn about them when offline (check connection with navigator.onLine).

UX and testing tips
Make search incremental, highlight matches, show file-type icons, and provide an All/Type dropdown and a clear Reset. Include a static alphabetical fallback page for no-JS environments. Test the finished CD on the actual target OSes and browsers — file:// behavior and local security rules vary a lot. If you do not want to build an index yourself, consider a commercial CD indexing tool as suggested.

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Member Avatar for tgreer

No HTML file is going to give you access to the entire contents of the CD. You're going to have to look for another solution. I know there are commerical programs (document management systems) that index and provide search facilities. I don't know about "free" systems.

Do a search for [search]index search CD files[/search]. I did and found this company:
http://www.wrensoft.com/zoom/

Member Avatar for Alicat

Thanks for your advice. I did look into the software you posted a link for. Looks like they'd do what I want if all the files I have are searchable (some are graphics or video unfortunately).

Do you recommend I post this in a JSP discussion group? Or different technology?

Thanks.

Member Avatar for tgreer

If you want to program this yourself, then you'll need to post in the forum appropriate to whatever software development language you know or use. C#, Java, etc.

Otherwise, perhaps one of the forums in the Tech Talk category, to get advice on these kinds of programs?

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