Forum OpenACS Development: Response to How to make an object type searchable?

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Posted by Jowell Sabino on
I need a bit more clarification on what "datasource" is (implemented as a tcl procedure above). I can't find the specification of what datasource is supposed to provide, but judging from the code, datasource seems to extract information 1) about the content, and 2) the content itself presumably for actual indexing by the search engine.

Pardon me if this question is silly, but if content is some binary file (like a pdf file stored in file storage, for example), will the content still be indexable/searchable? Or is it expecting too much for binary files (or in general, blobs) to be searchable, too? If binary file contents are not searchable, then "datasource" is limited to information about the binary file, and not the contents of the binary file. In other words, I could search for "files whose filename contain foo", but I cannot search for "files that contain the word foo".

If binary files/blobs are searchable, that is really cool. The implementation of datasource will probably be messy though when the CR is used, since content can be stored in three ways...