CCK & Search

Interesting idea. Lots of time passed from the day I created this advsearch module for Drupal 4.6 and now I understand that it is depricated. I found a way how to customize search for different content types. I'm using Flexinode in this example but it doesn't matter. Here is a description of my approach:

Assume, I've created a new content type "melody" and my new search module name for melodies is "band_melody".
1. Create function band_melody_form_alter($form_id, &$form). For $form_id == 'search_form' && arg(1) == 'band_melody' alter the search form as you want it to be.
2. Create band_melody_search_validate() to validate your new fields.
3. Customize output using theme_band_melody_search_form().
4. Implement hook_search() to create a search logic.
5. Create band_melody_search_page() to customize search results page.

Using this approach, you will need one module to customize search of one content type.

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Regards,
Dmitry Kresin, ARDAS group (www.ardas.dp.ua)

So, CCK_SearchForms will be a separate module which will be able to generate forms for CCK content types. May be they can be even used to customize node page, what do you think ?
One important thing - this new module should give an ability to customize forms layout via theme_ function because it is usually required to customize search forms to make them beautifull.

Not sure now about advsearch module will be required at all.
----------------
Regards,
Dmitry Kresin, ARDAS group (www.ardas.dp.ua)

My solution is the following:

axiom 1 - Body field is necessary for search module to perform text search.
axiom 2 - CCK nodes may have various data fields (search module doesn't know anything about them).
axiom 3 - CCK module doesn't produce any bodies for his nodes automatically (as Flexinode did for instance).

So, we should produce bodies for these nodes ourselves. More then, we can decide what exactly we need for each type of node to make it searchable. Node bodies will be used only for search and should no influence on output because they are overwritten in content_view() hook:

  $node->body = implode('', _content_field_invoke('view', $node, FALSE, $page));
  $node->teaser = implode('', _content_field_invoke('view', $node, TRUE, $page));
  $node->readmore = (strlen($node->teaser) < strlen($node->body));
}

We can implement hook_nodeapi() 'insert' and 'update' operations in a module which is specific to your project to produce certain bodies depending on node types.
It will be something like this:

function mymodule_nodeapi($node, $op, $arg = 0) {
  switch ($op) {
    case 'insert':
    case 'update':
      if ( .... check type of the $node....) {
        mymodule_write_body($node); // will update node body with a necessary values.
      }
      break;
  }
}

NOTE: you can just update body, you don't need to worry about creation because hook_nodeapi() fires after the node has been already saved into a table.

The advantage of such approach is that we can produce only necessary text for body field which may consist of only needed CCK field values. Flexinode generated bodies automatically, so they were filled up with unnecessary values.

What do you think about all these ?
----------------
Regards,
Dmitry Kresin, ARDAS group (www.ardas.dp.ua)