I've often though it'd be useful to have a start= modifier to a formated search just like the count= modifier. That way you can control how may search results are displayed in a topic, but also provide a 'next' link, much like most internet search engines.

for example you could have a formated search tag like:

%SEARCH{"%URLPARAM{\"query\"}%" sort="modified" start="%URLPARAM{\"start\"}%" count="%URLPARAM{\"count\"}%" format="---+++ $topic"}%

to search for 'twiki' your first link would be:

topicname?query=twiki&start=1&count=10

you could then use some method (JavaScript, SpreadSheetPlugin, custom plugin, or formatted search could automatically generate it if start= is detected) to calculate the 'next' link:

topicname?query=twiki&start=(start+count)&count=10

and the 'previous' link:

topicname?query=twiki&start=(start-count)&count=10 (anything < 1 would = 1 of course)

and so on and so on. I don't imagine it'd be too difficult to trim the results from grep to suit the above parameters.

How does that sound?

-- AndrewTetlaw - 11 Feb 2002

Sounds like a useful extension and should not be too difficult to implement. Any takers?

-- PeterThoeny - 13 Feb 2002

Hey I'm a real Perl newbie so please excuse the following. I think a start=x argument would be very easy to implement. apart from the change to take $start as an argument (which would be trivial) I think all we'd need to do is change a few lines in: sub searchWeb in the TWiki::Search module.

It appears all we have to change is this:

    # then shorten list and build the hashes for date and author
    my $idx = $theLimit + 10;  # slack on limit
    @topicList = ();
    foreach( @tmpList ) {
        push( @topicList, $_ );
        $idx -= 1;
        last if $idx <= 0;
    }

to this:

    # then shorten list and build the hashes for date and author
    my $idx = $theLimit + 10;  # slack on limit
    $start = 0 if ( ! $start );
    @topicList = ();
    for( my $i = $start; $i < $idx; $i++) {
        push( @topicList, $tmpList[$i] );
    }

what do the Perl programmers think?

-- AndrewTetlaw - 01 Mar 2002