simple search api (was Re: mimetype standardisation by testsets)

[Jos van den Oever]

Hi Mikkel,

Yes, the common dbus api is still something we need. I wanted to start
on the metadata standarization first, but we can do the searching api
in parallel. You make a good start in listing the available engines.
There might even be more. To coordinate we need a process that lists
the available search engines over dbus. An application should be able
to say: I want to search using a particular interface with the
available search engines.

The attached archive contains an effort to do two things:
- propose a very simple, common api for search engines
- implement such a coordinating daemon
  The code contains the daemon, a demo search application and a python
client to access it by finding the search engine over the
searchmanager.

The proposal for the search api is _very_ simple and I call for
application developers to see if the function calls in there are
sufficient.
Here i paste them for convenience:


 interface org.freedesktop.search.simple

method startConfiguration ( )
Open a graphical interface for configuring of search tool.

method countHits ( in s query , out i count )
Count the number of instances of a file that match a particular query.
Input:
query
    The query being performed.
Output:
count
    The number of documents that match the query.

method query ( in s query, in i offset, in i limit , out as hits )
Perform a query and return a list of files that match the query.
Input:
query
    The query being performed.
offset
    The offset in the result list for the first returned result.
limit
    The maximum number of results that should be returned.

Output:
hits
    A list if filenames that are the result of the query.

method getProperties ( in as files,in a(sa(sas)) properties )
Get properties for the given files.
Input:
files
    A list of files for which properties should be returned.
properties
    The properties belonging to each file. Each property is a name
associated with a list of string values. The index of each property
map in the list corresponds to the index of the filename in the list
of files.

2006/11/3, Mikkel Kamstrup Erlandsen <mikkel.kamstrup at gmail.com>:
> > 2006/10/30, Jos van den Oever <
> >
> > jvdoever at gmail.com>:
> >
> > > To make it a bit more concrete (yes, you're probably not running
> > > strigi svn) here's some code that generates the xml output using
> > > kde3's metadata framework. I'm sure doing the same for other programs
> >
> >
> > > is easy too. Then comes the hard task: making it all consistent.
> >
> > Here's already a new version of the kde3 code. I forgot to escape the
> > special xml entities.
> > It's probably a good idea to open up a project in svn for this stuff.
> >
> >
> > If there's enough interest about it, that is. Can someone arrange
> > that? The testcases should also go in there.
> >
> > Cheers,
> > Jos
> >
>
>  Picking up the track from Gnome d-d-l I am interested in hearing if your
> are also looking into a unifying dbus api for desktop indexers? Being a
> deskbar developer I am greatly interested in this part of a potential spec.
>
>
> If you are more on the metadata extraction part of it now (as it would seem)
> I can try and make an overview of the current available apis, and try to
> make some form of synthesis we can use as a base for further discussion...
>
> Cheers,
> Mikkel
>
>
> PS: What indexers are around (and actively developed/maintained, and
> actually has working code):
>
>  - Tracker http://www.gnome.org/~jamiemcc/tracker/
>
>  - Beagle http://beagle-project.org/
>  - Strigi
> http://www.vandenoever.info/software/strigi/
>  - Pinot http://pinot.berlios.de/
>  - GLSCube http://www.glscube.org/
>  - Nepomuk
> http://nepomuk-kde.semanticdesktop.org (do
> they have any code?)
>
> _______________________________________________
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> xdg at lists.freedesktop.org
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>
>
>
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