search_files or search_attachments?

I actually started with Search Attachments back in March. I had a potential client that was looking at it to index hundreds of files and wanted to know the capabilities of Search Attachments. I took a look at it, tested it it worked fine. I decided I wanted to do the site in Drupal 6 so I created a port of Search Attachments to Drupal 6, see attached. I contacted Markj Search Attachment's Maintainer

Mark,
I would like to say Search Attachments is a great piece of work, I had
very little trouble getting it to work, and that was just finding the
right helper apps. I also had very little trouble porting it to 6.x.
Attached is my port to 6 based on the download of 5.x-4.0 that I
downloaded 13 Mar 2008. When you get 5.x-4.0 committed let me know and
I will create a patch against it, or if you like I can commit the
changes myself.

his reply:

James, this is awesome! I'm working through some scalability issues(Duh, I meant a user who has a huge number of files to index...) with a guy but am planning to close work on 5.x-4 over the Easter weekend.

I haven't heard from him since.

In my testing of my port to Drupal 6 I wanted to test it with a large number of files so I found some at http://e-text.org/text, downloaded them all, and wrote a script to start attaching them to nodes to be indexed. It indexed them fine but the script I wrote to attach 680 files to new nodes broke somethings in the database.
I decided that Search Attachments is great at searching files attached to nodes in a meaningful manner (it even gives a link to the node in the search results so you can see the file in context), but for indexing a large amount of files it is pointless to arbitrarily create a node for each file. So I created Search Files to search any directory on the server you wish.

I actually used my port to D6 as the base for Search Files so there are a lot of similarities.
Differences:

• Search Files will search any directory(multiple directories) readable by the web server, Search Attachments will only search files attached to nodes
• Search Attachments links to the nodes the file is attached to as well as the file. Search Files does not, though this could be added in a later release.
• Search Files has a release for Drupal 6, Search Attachments kinda has a release for Drupal 5(you have to go to markj's website to get it)

Search Attachments only searches the files attached to Drupal nodes. Search Files will search any directory on the server.

For example the company I work for has a restaurant Franchise. Yearly we have a CD mailed to us from Corporate with the new standards for producing the foods, updates to cooking temperatures and times, preparation procedures, etc... All these files are PDFs. I copy the CD to the server, give Search Files the directory and when it is finished indexing all our store managers can now search the Standards Library, a couple of hundred PDFs. I don't have to create a bunch of nodes to attach the files to(one at a time), I just have to upload all the files at one(or put the CD in the server as is the case) and do one minute of setup. Best of all the managers don't have to look through all the files to find the information they need.

I suppose they could be combined.

Hi James, sorry I didn't get the port to D6 ready in time, but the version you mention 5.x-4 (first dev version released 2008-03-07) supports files not attached to nodes and indexing of files in arbitrary directories. I've been testing and adding new diagnostic features so haven't released it and therefore haven't ported to 6.x yet either. So from your description your module appears to be a subset of search_attachments sans the 6.x compatibility. As soon as I resolve an outstanding potential access problem (hopefully this week, just looking at organic groups to learn more about db_rewrite_sql) I'll be releasing 5.x-4 and then porting to 6.x.

Hi James & Mark,
I'm trying to decide whether we should use search_files or search_attachments?
It's not clear to me whether what we're looking could be accomplished better by the search_attachments module or the search_files module.

We're using Drupal 6, and want to offer users a search form (or optionally, an advanced search) to do as many of the following as possible:
* Bring results not only from nodes, but also from files that are attached (via CCK Filefield).
* Ideally the results would be in the same tab (but this isn't absolutely necessary).
* It would be great to link to the node itself, and not directly to the attached file (also not absolutely necessary).
* Some of the files might be large-ish (10 or 15 MB).
* The main issue I have is that I want to be sure the files are associated with the node they're attached to, which is why I was looking at this module over the search_files one (because search_files searches an entire directory regardless of whether they're attached to nodes).

So which do you recommend?
* If you recommend search_attachments... Mark, what do you think about the 6.x port attached in #1 above? http://drupal.org/files/issues/search_attachments-6.x-1.0.tar_.gz
* If you recommend search_files... James, do you have any advice based on the needs listed above?

Thanks for your time guys :)
Scott

Hi Scott,

I have stopped supporting search attachments so I suggest you use search_files.

Mark

As "markj" now no longer supports the excellent search_attachments module, is there any chance incorporating the searching of attached files to nodes in the near future ?

Thanks
Stephen

The new maintainer of Search Attachments lee20 and I have discussed merging the two projects. We figure that should be easy enough since this was based on that.

The initial thought was to make Search Files -> Search Files API, which will include settings, and functionality to auto detect helper apps, etc... Plans are still in the works for the merge, more information will be coming shortly

Thanks for the update.

Much appreciated

Stephen

I am very interested in having a good file search function added to Drupal. Is there any progress in the merging?
Thanks!

Kudos on the excellent work to date (from all members involved)! I'm eagerly following the progress, and wanted to see what the current status was. Is the best place to visit the search_files project page?

Steve