Hi,

Happy New Year to you too! To answer your questions:

> about metacharacters: does it accept regular expressions? or does it accept files pattern matching? or does it > accept SQL-86 syntax? or otherwise a custom syntax?

The search syntax is basically the same as that used by Lucene. You can read more about it here: http://wiki.collectiveaccess.org/index.php?title=Search_Syntax

Note that this syntax doesn't support regular expressions (it does support wildcards however) and is not SQL. It's not custom though - the Lucene syntax is (arguably) a de-facto standard.

> about the search query: which fields of which tables are searched for, for example in the "Object Search"?

By default, all of the fields defined in app/conf/search_indexing.conf are searched. While this file exists in both Providence and Pawtucket, the Providence copy is the one that really matters since all indexing of content (except for user generated content) is performed in Providence.

The standard search_indexing.conf setup indexes all metadata elements, preferred and non-preferred labels and a variety of built-in fields as well as titles of related items (eg. entity names are indexed against the objects to which they are related).

> I'm asking because I get inconsistent results with searches for - say - "idno" field in an "Object Search": the > "best match" for me to search for the object with idno "174AC" was to use the search string "174*", which > yelds two results (while I would expect one): "174AC" and "588AC". I can't figure why the second object was > returned... More, the most logical search term "174AC" returns no results... :-(

The wildcard search probably hits those two because 174 appears somewhere in the 588AC record. If you mistype the field qualifier it will be ignored and the search performed on all indexed fields. What is the exact search string you input?

I just created a record in one of our test databases with the identifier 174AC and searched for it - it worked. So I'm not sure what the issue is in your setup. How old is the code you're running? And when was the last time you reindexed your database? We did fix some issues relating idno searching about three months ago (perhaps it was even longer); an update + a reindex will give you the benefits of these fixes if you don't already have them.

> Should I dig into "advanced search forms"? I would better avoid it, since my search needs are quite "basic"...

Nope. Stick with the basic search for now. All the advanced search does is construct a field-specific Lucene query string and pass it through the same search system. It's not going to do anything magical for you.

> I assume the "Object Search" and "Quick Search" items do implement the same search logic, since they return > the same results to me...

Yes, they both pass the search through the same code. The main difference between the object search and quick search, besides formatting of results, is that the quick search executes searches on many different types of records at the same time, which the object search just searches objects (of course).

seth