Question

Searching within text of Mendix filedocuments

1

Has anybody already tried to build functionality that from within Mendix one can search inside filedocuments? We have a client who would like this functionality to be able to search for a keyword and as result get the filedocuments where this keyword is used inside the documents. I know it is not an easy task but not undoable (at least that is what I think now). Has anyone played with this idear of already build something like this? Regards, Ronald

asked 2013-09-16

Ronald Catersels

2 answers

Herbert Vuijk · Answer 1 · 2013-09-16

It's not about searching in Mendix 'filedocuments'. It's about searching in PDFs, DOCs, XLS, or whatever is stored in the filedocuments. And that is not a simple thing.

We used the Apache Lucene to index and search just PDFs in the past. But is has to be done in Java. I guess you'll need a Java expert to help you with this, there's not just a simple answer to this question. Anyway, I hope that this helps you a bit further.

Samet Kaya · Answer 2 · 2013-09-16

I think you need to create a searchindex on those filedocuments after a commit. You can easily search in Mendix on this 'searchindex' object.

Difficult part is how to create the search index. Probably you need a java-action to read the contents of a filedocument and save this in an attribute in the search index object.

Searching on google and stackoverflow results in a couple of java-libraries which are already supporting fulltext searches in documents. Good luck!