Firefox and form tags

Here's one for you.

If you have a table layout with form elements within it, make sure you place the form tags outside the table altogether. Put them just inside the body tag if you can.

I was putting form tags within table tags, and it was causing the form to close itself prematurely.

I was using javascript to render the form elements, and when looking at the generated source, I saw that firefox was closing the form tag early.

It works okay within IE 8, though it breaks in Chrome and Firefox.

Let that be a lesson to you. It certainly was for me!

An introduction to indexing

I'm writing this blog because there's no solid guide on indexing services with ASP.NET, so I'm going to pull together a bit of a guide on how to do it in the hope it helps someone else.

Setting up

Setting up the indexing service itself is fairly simple.

Follow this guide:

http://www.windowsnetworking.com/articles_tutorials/Making-Windows-Server-2003-Indexing-Service-Useful.html

That guide'll only give you information on creating a query form for ASP.

To create one with .NET I'll explain some sample code later on.

Indexing PDFs

If you're looking to index PDFs as well, download and install this on your server:

http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/detail.jsp?ftpID=2611

That'll automatically work after you stop and re-start the indexing service. It does take a while so be patient.

.NET Query Form

Basic implementation of .NET query forms is explained in the links below:

http://www.codeproject.com/aspnet/search.asp

and

http://idunno.org/articles/278.aspx

The .NET implementation of a form itself is dead easy. The problem is that most forms would require a search for "Any phrase" and "Exact match" as options.

The exact match bit is the tricky bit. Code's explained a bit below:

'Any Words
Select DocTitle,Filename,Size,PATH,URL, Rank, Characterization, Write from SCOPE('deep traversal of ""/documents""') where FREETEXT('" & strSearch & "')

'Search Exact Phrase
strSearch = """" + strSearch + """"
Select DocTitle,Filename,Size,PATH,URL, Rank, Characterization, Write from SCOPE('deep traversal of ""/documents""') where contains('" & strSearch & "')

The search phrase is double-quoted because the indexing service needs quotes around it to conduct an exact search. That took me quite a while to work out!

The standard contains statement seems to work for me, although I may come back and correct this if it turns out to not do quite the job I'd expected.

If anybody has any questions on this, leave a comment with your email address and I'll get back to you.