Overview of Index Server

Undoubtedly, this has happened to you: You wrestle tirelessly with a complex subject, and having mastered it at last, you immediately think of concrete measures the subject's teacher could have taken to frame the subject more simply, and to make mastering the subject more pleasant.

The Index Server is a complex subject. Although remarkably powerful, it consists of an initially bewildering array of pieces. First, there's the notion of catalogs and scope (we'll get to this soon enough). Then there's the query language. Then there's the process of hiding the details of this language from your users through the use of intuitive search forms. Finally, add to this the fact that there are three quite distinct approaches you can take to querying the Index Server.

• Static searching. You can use a combination of HTM, IDQ and HTX files to build indexing into your site. Although this process is less amenable to customization than are other approaches to Index Server searching, it comes with the advantage of enabling you to provide search capabilities in your site without having to write code.
  
  
• Active Server Pages (ASP) searching. The newest version of the Index Server defines the

  Query

  and

  Utility

  objects, two scriptable objects specifically designed to support searching from within ASP code. When you execute a query using these objects, you get back an ActiveX Data Objects (ADO)

  Recordset

  . This

  Recordset

  object, like any other, contains fields of information through which you can iterate, just as you would through a

  Recordset

  retrieved from a database table.
  
  
• ActiveX Data Objects (ADO) searching using a SQL statement rather than the

  Query

  and

  Utility

  objects. The Index Server is an OLE DB provider. That's a fancy way of saying that you can use the ADO to query an Index Server catalog, submitting SQL queries to the catalog transparently as if it were just another database.

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