Index Server -- Making Searchable Documents

Making Searchable Documents

All you have to do to make the index search work is to add the <ISINDEX> tag into an HTML document. Everything else is automatic: the inverted index is automatically generated by search first time a search is made, and updated by httpd_wais_update which is run regularly as a crontab job.

Customizing the Resulting Document

If you want, however, to make the search result document contain a certain prelude and postlude, and a certain message, if no matching documents were found, create the files:
        index.prelude
	index.postlude
	index.nomatch
in the same directory as the searchable document.

The File index.prelude

index.prelude contains the HEAD-section of the document, the <BODY> tag, and possibly some text provided by you.

The File index.postlude

index.postlude contains text provided by you, ended by </BODY> tag.

The search results go between those two as a list, the <UL> and </UL> tags are provided by the script.

The File index.nomatch

index.nomatch contains the text to be printed if no document matched your keyword(s). Prelude and postlude are still present.

The Escape index_keywords

In every one of these three files you can use the string index_keywords to signify the keywords to the search. This string is then replaced by the keywords.

AL 24 November 1993