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

[Jos van den Oever]

2006/11/27, Joe Shaw <joeshaw at novell.com>:
> Sorry, I am just now catching up on this thread, I'm a little behind.
I'm glad you're joining. The users are getting the upper hand and
saying things like:
>> Again, some backends will have native caching capabilities, others
won't. I think we should focus on keeping the interface easy to use
for application developers, and leave the headaches to the search
engine devs... Sorry guys :-)

> On Sun, 2006-11-19 at 12:19 +0100, Jos van den Oever wrote:
> > 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.
>
> Throughout this you use the term "file".  I presume that you mean more
> than just files (like emails, for instance).  Can the spec be updated to
> reflect this?
I certainly main URI, yes.

> > 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.
>
> This method will be pretty inefficient in Beagle, as each file will
> require a query to the index.  We could maybe cache these, but it seems
> to be that it would be more useful to instead have two query methods:
> one which returned only a list of URIs and one which returned URIs and
> document properties.
I'm fine with an additional query function. I avoided this in the
first place because the return message would become rather big. How
about:

  method queryDetailed ( in s query, in i offset, in i limit , out
a(sa(sas)) hits )
  Perform a query and return a list of URIs 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 URIs with properties that are the result of the query.

How about adding the matching text fragment? This should also be a
a(sas) because the hits may occur in different fields.

Cheers,
Jos