Summary

In this chapter, we've briefly examined Index Server, a powerful component of Internet Information Server on Windows NT Server. We've reviewed the various ways in which we can use Index Server to incorporate sophisticated search capabilities into our web sites.

The main things we've covered in this chapter are:

• An overview of Index Server. In this section, we examined the Index Server architecture and reviewed some of its major capabilities, including the kinds of documents it stores, the kinds of information it indexes, and the kinds of queries we can perform.
  
  
• An introduction to static querying. In this section, we looked at how we can combine Internet Data Query (IDQ), HTML, and HTX files to perform fast and easily configured searches without writing code.
  
  
• An introduction to the new Query and Utility objects, which combined, provide us with the ability to describe and execute a query, and to get back an ADO Recordset that contains the query's results.
  
  
• An overview of how to use the Active Data Objects (first introduced in Chapter 7) to query the Index Server just as we would query any other database.

The code samples in this chapter are designed to accomplish two objectives. First, they're intended to illustrate concepts (such as scope) that are not covered intensively in the samples included with the Index Server. Second, they're intended to be simpler that those included with the Index Server. Sometimes, this simplicity is achieved at the expense of capabilities you're likely to want to build into your site. These capabilities include the following:

• The ability to define your own searchable document properties. In addition to using the

  write

  ,

  content

  ,

  filename

  , and other document properties that we've discussed, you can define new properties. We purposely ignored this subject in view of the small number of developers that are likely to need to do this.
  
  
• The ability to build 'paging' into search pages that use the

  Query

  and

  Utility

  objects. We intentionally used a non-paging sample here. Building multi-page capabilities into these samples is a project of its own, though the samples included with the Index Server do illustrate this capability in more detail.

You can access the Index Server samples from the Windows NT Option Pack option on the Start menu, or by opening them directly in your browser. If you accepted the default directories when installing the Option Pack, you can get to the Index Server samples from:

http://localhost/IISamples/ISSamples/Default.htm

This chapter finishes our discussion of new topics. In the final two chapters we'll be looking at two topics that it's easy to forget about in the flush of new development with an exciting language like Active Server Pages. In the final chapter we look at how we can use existing 'legacy' components and sub-components to build Active Server Components that we can use in ASP. In the next chapter, however, we tackle the more mundane task of browser compatibility—with a case study that attempts to provide the best results on all kinds of different browsers.

© 1998 by Wrox Press. All rights reserved.