Would it also help implementing the SearchForAttachments enhancement? I still can't believe that this isn't possible yet.

Several of my users asked for this quite naturally feature of being able to collect a list (table) of attachments and their latest 'modification' date in a seperate topic. Of course I'm aware of the fact that this isn't quite the right way to use a Wiki (especially TWiki) but unfortunately this may be one of the most widespread (mis)application of TWiki, I fear.

-- FranzJosefSilli - 16 Jun 2004

This is a very good question, and one that a number of us have been struggling with for a long time now. Meta data, such as attachments, form data, and revision control data is all data and shoud be searchable and otherwise recoverable in the same way as topic text.

There are a number of solutions to this problems, including the FormQueryPlugin, that try to "level the playing field" and make meta-data accessible in a structured way. But there is no architectural direction pushing TWiki towards making this easier.

Perhaps it will just have to continue to be done in Plugins. I'm sure it wouldn't be too hard to get the FormQueryPlugin to maintain a table of attachments along with the other topic information it records.

-- CrawfordCurrie - 16 Jun 2004

I have written a patch to TablePlugin (much of it copied from search) to search tables held in meta data (in the style of SimpleTableEntryUsingForms). I would guess that this could be easily extended to also search for attachments. Note that I have not ported to Cairo yet.

-- ThomasWeigert - 16 Jun 2004

(Trumpet blowing) FormQueryPlugin already does this and more. And I just added the attachments table to the topic hash as well, so you can search and report on attachments too.

-- CrawfordCurrie - 16 Jun 2004

Oh, and AFAICT it works with Cairo. -- CC