Re: Clarification on the indexer

Anselm, I presented your suggestion to my staff and we all
agree that your suggestion of implementing the ResourceIndexer
as an interface would be very good for our needs.

Thanks 

Bruce Nelson
FileNet Corp.

Costa Mesa California - USA

On Tue, 3 Sep 1996, Anselm Baird-Smith wrote:

> 
> Bruce Nelson writes:
>  > Anselm I think your are right insaying we would want to
>  > modify the indexer itself... our site is made up of a collection
>  > of materials that are....
>  > HTML Documents
>  > CGI (Lots of CGI)
>  > Documents from an imaging system (FAXes mainly)
>  > Dynamic Information coming from our engineering group
>  > 
>  > and all of this information is either...
>  > Completely accessable
>  > filtered
>  > or not available
>  > according to the users security privledge and
>  > the objects access privledge
>  > 
>  > if the information is not available
>  > I dont want the user to know its there
>  > ..our goal here was to have a site that would not say no,
>  > it would onlt make available the items that are accessable
>  > to the user.
>  > 
>  > All of these objects are registered within a 
>  > Sybase RDBMS along with the users and all of the security
>  > info needed to do this. our current project is PERL based
>  > but afer reading your initial papers on Jigsaw and working
>  > with the alpha we could see that we could intigrate many of our back-end 
>  > cgi applications into the httpd.  
>  > 
>  > This is where the indexer came in as an issue. I think if we could index
>  > on the fly from our RDBMS instead of the default method according to the 
>  > users access, we could bypass the need for cgi (or resource) controlled 
>  > indexes and document serving.
> 
> Are you familiar with the way Jigsaw's indexer work ? WHat happens is
> the following: when a directory resource is queried for an URL it
> doesn't know about, it checks to see if an appropriate file exsist. If
> so, it hands it out to the resource indexer, that will return a
> suitable resource for that file (depending on extensions, if this is a
> file, or directory templates if it is a directory).
> 
> One thing I could do (let me know if this would help you), is the
> following: make the ResourceIndexer an interface, and make the current
> resource indexer a SampleResourceIndexer, implementing that
> interface. I would then add a new property to Jigsaw in order to know
> what indexer class it should use as an indexer.
> 
> If this makes sense (BTW to anyone) then the ResourceIndexer interface
> would probably look like:
> 
> public interface ResourceIndexer {
>      public Resource createDirectoryResource(File directory
>                                              , String name
>                                              , Hashtable defs);
> 
>      public Resource createFileResource(File file
>                                         , String name
>                                         , Hashtable defs);
> 
> }
> 
> The File parameter is the "object" to be indexed (it has to be refered
> to by something, in this case a File instance).
> The name is the identifier for the resource to be created (can be
> different from the file's name)
> The defs hashtable is a set of default attribute values for the
> resource to be created.
> 
> If this would be of any use to anyone let me know. Note that you could
> implement such an interface, and "chain" indexer together. Say you
> implement the FancyResourceIndexer, if it doesn't know how to create a
> resource, it could forward the call to a "default"
> SampleResourceIndexer instance.
> 
> I think I could find the time to make that change, but before going
> further, I want to make sure it will be usefull to anyone. So let me
> know.
> 
> Anselm.
>

Received on Thursday, 5 September 1996 04:44:43 UTC