The Indexer Suite

There is a definite dearth of good site indexes on the World Wide Web. There are numerous search engines, and many sites are searchable by keyword, but a carefully constructed index can often be more useful than a keyword search. Among other things, you can simply browse an index; you have to know or guess the right keyword(s) for a successful keyword search.

There have been numerous requests for indexing tools on the Script Meridian Frontier-Community e-mail list, and I've answered a few questions about how to build such tools. I figured it'd be a good use of time to create a utility to do the hard work, into which people could easily plug their own pieces to create customized indices.

What Can You Do With It?

How about...

• Build keyword indices of any one or more tables in the ODB.
• Build keyword indices of part or all of a website.
• Build hierarchical keyword indices (e.g., frontier:resources, frontier:resources:tutorials).
• Walk a keyword index to generate HTML for a web page, or for any other reason you could imagine.
• Walk just a portion of a keyword index (by keyword) to generate HTML for a web page, or for any other reason you could imagine.

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Release Notes

• v. 1.0b5 - 18 Aug 1999
• Added BuildPageIndexGeneric script.
• Uses callbacks to test whether to include a given page entry (test callback) and to get index information (info callback). See indexer.doc.BuildPageIndexGeneric for more info.
• v. 1.0b4 - 24 May 1999
• Added BuildTableIndexGeneric script.
• Uses callbacks to test whether to include a given table (test callback) and to get index information (info callback). See indexer.doc.BuildTableIndexGeneric for more info.
• v. 1.0b3 - 16 Mar 1999
• Modified BuildPageIndex so you can send it a single bottom-level item to be indexed.
• Added doExpandNestedKeywords parameter to both BuildPageIndex and BuildTableIndex.
• Indicates whether to generate flattened entries as well as nested entries.
• Example:
• Keyword: "this:is:a:test"
• If doExpandNestedKeywords = FALSE
• [index table].this.is.a.test.[item]
• If doExpandNestedKeywords = TRUE
• [index table].this.is.a.test.[item]
• [index table].this.[item]
• [index table].is.[item]
• [index table].a.[item]
• [index table].test.[item]
• Created utils.KeywordIndexList to provide expanded or non-expanded list of index tables.
• Returns list of one address if doExpandNestedKeywords == FALSE.
• Returns same address plus flattened address if doExpandNestedKeywords == TRUE.
• First item in list is always nested index address.
• v. 1.0b2 - 7 Mar 1999
• Modified BuildTableIndex so you can send it a single bottom-level table to be indexed.
• v. 1.0b1 - 4 Feb 1999
• Initial release.