complexity of index

Maa27 · September 27, 2007

I take it that seach relies on the indexing of records. Could one specify the level od depth for this: say tick the fields one wants indexed or specify no indexing beyond so many characters. I'd be happy to use advanced search to find things in abstracts but would prefer to limit the search filtering to author and title. My guess is that this could also improve speed quite substantially and allow users to tweak as a tradeoff between searching and number of records.

dstillman · September 27, 2007

Actually, metadata values aren't indexed at all at the moment, since the quicksearch does an unbounded search (e.g. value LIKE '%foo%') and the default operator for advanced searches is "contains", which is also unbounded. (The only case where an index on the value could help would be with an "is" advanced search condition.)

In a future release we'll probably implement multiple modes on the quicksearch, and one would likely be to search only metadata fields (as opposed to notes and the fulltext word index of attachment content, as happens currently).

The other likely possibility is creating a word index of metadata values and note text, but we'd want to wait to see if SQLite's FTS2 module makes it into Firefox 3 and is usable for that before doing a manual implementation.

Maa27 · September 28, 2007

Then its even easier that I thought. All I wanted to say is that for those of us trying to make Zotero work nicely with loads of records it would be useful to restrict the searches to particular fields. I for one only want author and title for the search as you type (which I've commented about elsewhere) and prefer the advanced to lookup text anywhere else in the record .