Question

I'm creating a Knowledge Base, using the Know example as a basis. Users can add new topics and categorise them using a formfield.

I now want users to be able to search the Knowledge Base for a user-entered piece of text, and be able to choose which topics to look in by checking one or more of the topic categories.

An example. K.Base contains 3 categories of topics: A, B, C. A user wants to search for occurences of 'cat' in the topic body in topics with categories A and C, but not B.

I've spent the whole weekend looking through the TWiki documents, support web, and googled as well, but haven't found anything to give me a hint how to do this.

I would have thought that this would be a fairly common thing to want to do. Have hit a brick wall here, so help would be much appreciated.

Environment

-- HelenJohnstone - 18 Dec 2005

Answer

If you answer a question - or someone answered one of your questions - please remember to edit the page and set the status to answered. The status selector is below the edit box.

How are those categories being implemented?

-- JoachimBlum - 19 Dec 2005

Hi Joachim. I used the same approach as in the Know base at http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Know/WebHome. The categories are defined in the WebForm using a set of checkboxes for selection.

-- HelenJohnstone - 19 Dec 2005

This is a great question! You're right, it seems like this would be a fairly common "use case" - and yet, it's not so easy to implement. Here's a few notes towards providing a complete solution:

• Joachim question is the place to start because design of the search is dependent on how you implement the topic categories.
• You might check out TopicClassificationAddOn as it provides an easy way to create topic categories and includes pre-designed searches based on the categories you create. (BTW, if you are using DakarRelease, contact me about getting the new version of this addon designed for Dakar.)
• You will still need to design a search that allows you to provide the text to search for, plus select the categories. I'll try to create one in the next few days building upon the foundation of TopicClassificationAddOn.

You might also check-out FacetedNavigation and GenerateSearchPlugin. They relate to your question but don't yet provide a complete solution to your question.

But I agree that this is an important use case so I'll continue to work on it.

-- LynnwoodBrown - 19 Dec 2005