Adding Search functionality to Domino

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EXTENDING DOMINO FUNCTIONALITY
Adding Search functionality to Domino
By Michael Sobczak

One benefit of developing Notes applications that I've always appreciated is all of the functionality that is available to developers and end-users right out-of-the-box. A good example of this is the search functionality. While applications developed in other platforms require additional code to be written or modules to be implemented, Notes client users can begin a search in any Notes view simply by showing the search bar.

Show me the bar
Activating the search bar is accomplished by selecting View -> Search This View from the Notes menu bar, or by clicking on the Search Toolbar button (or SmartIcon). In Figure A, the search bar has been activated.

FIGURE A

The search bar has been turned on in this Notes application. Roll over picture for a larger image.

If the database isn't full text indexed, users can only perform simple text-based searches consisting of a single word or several words. If the database is full-text indexed, the advanced search features become available by clicking on the More tab shown in Figure B.

FIGURE B

More search options are available with the More tab. Roll over picture for a larger image.

Users now have the capability to search using one or more of the following advanced search query options (taken from the Lotus Notes 6 Help), shown in Table A.

Sample query	Finds
Use word variants	This option finds words with the base word + certain suffixes. For example, a search for "swim" will also find "swims," "swimming," "swimmer," and even "swimmed." It will not find the variation "swam," however, because the base word has changed, or "swimmet," or "swimsed" because the suffixes are not acceptable with that word.
Fuzzy search	This option finds documents that have matches similar to your search. For example, searching for "user requirement" will return documents containing "user group requirement" and "user has a requirement" while searching for "Califorrnia" (misspelled) will return documents containing "California" (correctly spelled).
Max results	This button allows you to increase or decrease the number of documents that will be returned by the search.
Sort results by	This option determines how your search results will be sorted. Select one of the following options in the drop-down list: relevance, last modified, first modified, keep current order (sortable), show all documents (sortable).