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# THE SEARCH ENGINE

MiniVend implements a search engine which will search the product database (or any other file) for items based on customer input. It uses either forms or link-based searches that are called with the special page name `scan`. The search engine uses many special MiniVend tags and variables.

If the search is implemented in a link or a form, it will always display formatted results on the results page, a MiniVend page that uses some combination of the `[search-region]`, `[search-list]`, `[more-list]`, `[more]`, and other MiniVend tags to format and display the results. The search results are usually a series of product codes/SKUs or other database keys, which are then iterated over similar to the `[item-list]`.

Examples of search forms and result pages are included in the supplied demos.

Two search engine interfaces are provided, and five types of searching are available. The default is a text-based search of the first products database source file (i.e. products.txt). A binary search of a dictionary-ordered file can be specified. An optional Glimpse search is enabled by placing the command specification for Glimpse in the `catalog.cfg` directive Glimpse. There is a range-based search, used in combination with one of the above. And finally, there is a fully-coordinated search with grouping.

The default, a text based search, sequentially scans the lines in the target file. By default it returns the first field (delineated by the delimiter for that database, for every line matching the search specification. This corresponds to the product code, which is then used to key specific accesses to the database.

The text-based search is capable of sophisticated field-specific searches with fully-independent case-sensitivity, substring, and negated matching.

- The Search Form
- Glimpse
- Fast Binary Search
- Coordinated and joined searching
- Specifying a text-based search with SQL-like syntax
- Range Searching
- One-click searches
- Setting display options with mv_value
- In-page searches
- Search Profiles
- Search Reference
- The Results Page

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