[Xapian-discuss] Feature requests

[Bill Crawford]

On Tuesday 20 Feb 2007, Olly Betts wrote:

> > * The second thing is also something that would be easy to build into  
> > the client-software, but might be also a proper feature for xapian:   
> > Indexed terms can have positional informations. It would be handy to  
> > regain the information on which (positional indexed) terms a hit  
> > occured within the result, e.g. to generate previews that actually  
> > contain the requested tokens.
> 
> A "dynamic sample" feature would certainly be useful.
> 
> The positonal information is only scanned for phrase and near queries,
> and to the minimal extent possible to determine if they match or not.
> So it's probably not worth trying to store this explicitly as you'll
> need to scan the rest of the relevant positional information to find out
> where all the matches are.  Any positional information already read
> should still be in the disk cache when you come to generate the dynamic
> sample.

This would be MOST useful where a query has been entered e.g. as part of a CGI 
form, and could contain phrases, filters, etc., since currently one has to 
basically duplicate the work of parse_query to figure out what terms to 
highlight in results. Some way to get the information back as part of the 
results would be great (in particular, for a phrase match, only some of the 
relevant occurrences of a term should be highlighted, ...).

Anyway, a "me too" for some kind of feedback of the matched terms plus 
positions :) was looking for something similar here.

> Cheers,
>     Olly

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