Earlier today I wrote about the search plugin for firefox, our quick search system can interrogate these fields.
It isn’t a huge amount of fields, but they can be configured quite simply to be made searchable. If you have any suggestions of fields that you think would be useful to add to these (like I said earlier, cross table searching hasn’t been enabled so you can’t search find spot data.) Ideally parish/district/ county/ region will be added at some point soon.
- Find Id - for example PAS-A123AD
- Object type - for example coin
- Inscription - for example search on JESU
- Ascribed Culture - eg. Viking
- Broad period - eg. roman
With regards to building the Firefox plugin, it goes a little something like this:
Code, which forms the file PAS.src - located at www.finds.org.uk/documents/pas.src
An icon image which is located at www.finds.org.uk/documents/pas.gif
Both of these files are installed into the searchplugins folder of your mozilla installation. So if you want to create your own plugin for a web database, you may want to break down the construction of this plugin.
A guide to creating the syntax for search plugins can be found on O’Reilly and more resources are available on the Mycroft Moz dev website.
If you want to setup a link on your page to automatically install the files into the plugins folder, then you can make use of some JavaScript and a link. Obviously, you need to wrap this script in the javascript tags….
function errorMsg()
{
alert(”Mozilla or Firefox is needed to install this plugin - get a better browser!!!”);
}
function addEngine(name,ext,cat)
{
if ((typeof window.sidebar == “object”) && (typeof
window.sidebar.addSearchEngine == “function”))
{
//cat=”Web”;
//cat=prompt(’In what category should this engine be installed?’,'Web’)
window.sidebar.addSearchEngine(
“{Address to plugin}/”+name+”.src”,
“{Address to icon}/”+name+”.”+ext,
name,
cat );
}
else
{
errorMsg();
}
}
You then need to add the following as your hyperlink -
javascript:addEngine('{filename for the src file}','{file extension for the icon file}','{Category that you want the search plugin to be in}','0')
Thus for these two files, my javascript link is:
javascript:addEngine(’PAS’,'gif’,'Web’,'0′)
Simple, no? It’s obviously a bit of a fluff this extension, but it is good for quick searching our dataset without being logged in.
OpenCalais helped to tag this with: example search • gif • parish/district/ • search database fields/ plugin construction • search plugin • search plugins • search system • web database • www.finds.org.uk/documents/pas.gif • www.finds.org.uk/documents/pas.src
Possibly related posts: Microformats implemented (on the blog at least) • Searching our database • Search screen redesign •
