A "quick search" function for biblio nodes

Hi,

I'd like to offer and discuss a patch that I've written for our site. I'm not sure if you like the idea and/or its implementation, but we will be using it at our site anyway, so I won't be disappointed or angry if you reject it :-) The patch is against 6.x-1.x-dev (2008-Jun-16).

Our research assistants like the filter stuff for e.g. listing their own work or a "last years publication" block. But they also demanded for a "quick search" function for biblio, where they could enter e.g. "knuth 1984 tex" to find everything Donald Knuth wrote about TeX in 1984, no matter if "tex" would appear in a book title, conference name, keywords, abstract etc.

I tried two ways: First was making a biblio filter that would just "rlike" over the concatented fields of a biblio node. Drawbacks were that I had to filter the search input myself and that the mysql expression got a bit complicated in case of several "OR" in the search request. Also it was a bit tricky for me to get all the allowed fields for an input type to search just over them etc.

So I decided for the other way: using the drupal search and presenting the result in the biblio style. This is very easy to reach without writing a lot of code. I just let node_search do all the work, so I don't have to care about stuff like parsing the query etc. However, to be able to sort or export the results without adding a lot of code for a special case, I store the results as a filter which adds "where n.nid in (list of nids)" where the list of node ids is generated from the node_search.

Although search is stored as a filter, I didn't make it combineable with other filters, because I think that filtering and search are two different things that I wouldn't like to combine. Therefore entering a search query resets the filters, and selecting a filter resets the stored search query.

I placed the search box on the main biblio page for quick access. You make it smaller by uncommenting the code lines in the search form to make it collapsible. I added an option on the configuration page to enable or hide the search box. Additionally, it honors the permission setting for the drupal filter tab.

To find any results, the biblio nodes must be indexed. This is usually done by drupals cron job, but I manually enforce indexing of new or updated nodes so that you can search over them right after saving/updating. I found it confusing when I entered a new book and then couldn't find it :-) This indexing option can also be en- or disabled on the configuration page.

A drawback of drupal's search is the lack of a partial word search, see http://drupal.org/node/103548 It's gonna be in drupal 7, but for drupal 6 I find it confusing when I search for "TeX" in our biblio list and don't find books about "LaTeX". That would have worked with the "rlike" filter search over all the biblio fields, which I didn't implement, so I decided to rewrite the two-line patch from http://drupal.org/node/103548 to make partial word search work for drupal 6. I attach this patch, too, so that everyone who wants to use our search box can decide if he want's substring search or not.

I will be glad about any kind of comments, discussions, proposals etc. What I plan next is highlightning the search keywords for the detailed view of a biblio node, which I would prefer over adding a snippet to the search results, as it is done with the normal drupal search.

cu,
Frank