[Xapian-discuss] For more UI functionality: OmegaScript, C++ or other?

[Olly Betts]

On Sun, Apr 17, 2011 at 10:33:23PM +0530, xapian at catcons.co.uk wrote:
> We have Xapian and Omega working nicely.  Now we would like more
> functionality at the browser UI, such as being able to specify date ranges
> and being able to search the file name including looking only for, say, .odt
> files.
> 
> Question is whether the best choice for this would be to develop a template
> using OmegaScript or to switch to C++ or some other language.

Both the features your mention are already supported by Omega, so aren't
good reasons to switch.

For date ranges, you just need to set START and/or END CGI parameters.

For filtering by an extension, you need to use version 1.2.5, and then
you can pass CGI parameter B=Eodt to return only files with extension .odt
(or B=Ttext/html for HTML files regardless of the extension - mime-type
filtering works with older versions too).

> Given the paucity of skills available for development, the Omega template
> option is attractive but I am concerned that it may not be a good choice
> long term.  Extensive browsing of the mailing lists suggest that it is not a
> popular choice.  This is further suggested by the lack of examples of Omega
> templates both in the Xapian user-contributed documentation and generally on
> the web?  If this impression of Omega templates unpopularity is correct, why
> so?  Is it restrictive?

How did you try to find Omega templates on the web?  There isn't a
standard extension for them, and most of the command names are likely
to return many unrelated hits.  Also, not everyone is going to make
their templates public - they're often pretty specific to a site.

I'm not sure how widely used they are though - it's hard to get good
evidence on such things.  They can be a bit fiddly to write, depending
what you're trying to do.  The main annoyance in my experience is the
deep nesting of curly brackets you can end up.

Cheers,
    Olly