| adnet Solutions is a small web design and development company based in
the South West of England. It overhauled its own website in November 2003. The redesign
includes a search facility accessible from all of the pages within the website.  The
underlying technology of the search facility is provided by Microsoft's Indexing Services
on Windows 2000. The search results page is written in C# and uses a standard ASP.NET
DataGrid control to display the search results. Use of the DataGrid control potentially
allows paging of results and the ability for the user to sort the results by column. It
also allows the ADO.NET DataSet that populates the DataGrid control to be merged with data
from other sources, such as a SQL Server database full text index.
The Indexing Service Companion is used to provide the content for indexing. The Index
Server Companion was chosen for two main reasons:
- Ability to retrieve content by QueryString. The main adnet Solutions
website contains a portfolio area as well as a news articles area. Each individual client
portfolio item or news article is accessed from a single ASP.NET page using a different
QueryString value (e.g. http://www.adnet.co.uk/Portfolio.aspx?ID=1). The Index
Server Companion is, therefore, able to crawl the site and save each distinct client
portfolio item or news article as a distinct URL. Indexing Services without the Index
Server Companion cannot treat files with different QueryStrings as being distinct URLs.
- Ability to retrieve content from remote websites. adnet Solutions
is part of the Sheridan Group of businesses. The search facility allows users to
simultaneously search other Sheridan Group websites, including the product information
websites Lachesis.Biz and myCDE.com. These are hosted on different
machines (and indeed hosting companies) to the adnet Solutions website, so conventionally
Indexing Service or Indexing Services would not have been used to provide a single search
facility for all of the sites. Offering users the ability to search all the sites
simultaneously obviously allows them to access the information they might otherwise not be
able to find on the adnet Solutions website alone.
Once configured the Indexing Service Companion is run from a desktop machine using a
set of .bat scripts. The .bat scripts are run manually whenever one of the Sheridan Group
websites are updated. Using the Windows Task Scheduler it is of course possible to fully
automate the Indexing Service Companion. The integral FTP upload facility of the Indexing
Service Companion allows the content for indexing to be automatically upload to the
hosting provider's network.
Further Reading
- Sample code for accessing Indexing Service from ASP.NET using C#: ASP.NET
HTML, C# Code Behind Page. The Indexing Service Companion download file also
contains VB.NET sample code.
|
|
