[Xapian-discuss] How to use Xapian to build a Desktop Search Application in Win32 platform?

[Jarrod Roberson]

On Thu, Nov 20, 2008 at 2:56 PM, Jinqian Huang <blisdom at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hello ,I want to develop a simple and lightweight desktop
> search(fulltext) tool on Windows recently.
> After a lot of comparison ,I decide to use Xapian as the
> indexing-engine ,but i haven't found any useful article or tutorial
> that can help me implement my idea.I don't know how to process
> different types of files and it's contens when using Xapian.Can
> anybody give me some directions or advices?
> Is Xapian a good choice as the engine for implement what i want?
> Is there any another alternative can do this easily?
> Thanks advance!


Xapian is ideal for this, I have implemented a distributed file system and
use Xapian to index the locations of the files as well as search inside them
for contents.

You will have to write your own file parsers to retrieve the contents and
metadata about the files and what it is inside them that might be
interesting. There are some open source libraries for parsing popular
formats like RDF, PDF, .DOC, .XLS etc.

Xapian won't magically do any of the file contents processing for you. But
that said, Xapian is a good choice for something like this.
Especially useful if you use the scripting level bindings, like the Python
bindings which is what I used. Then it won't be a windows only application
as well.