I was trying to find some info on using BO with SAP’s Business Warehouse (BW). I found what I was looking for, so that’s not the question.

When I tried to search for ‘BW’ I got no results back. A search on ‘SAP’ yielded several messages that included ‘BW’ in the title and/or text.

Any thoughts why ‘BW’ didn’t work as a search term?

Tom Thompson (BOB member since 2003-06-04)

The search keyword has to be at least 3 characters long.
See also here: How can I search Bob?

Andreas (BOB member since 2002-06-20)

The shortest words included in the search index are 3 letters long.

Try looking here to see info about how Search ignores short words.

Anita Craig (BOB member since 2002-06-17)

Hi,

I’m trying to search for “5.1.8” (no quotes) and I get no results, even though the following thread exists:

What’s the deal? Am I missing something?

Thanks!
Chris

cjweis (BOB member since 2003-10-02)

Look here for an explanation why the search with keyword “5.1.8” does not find anything.

Andreas (BOB member since 2002-06-20)

Andreas,

Thanks. Any idea whether it will be fixed? Anything I can do to help?

Regards,
Chris

cjweis (BOB member since 2003-10-02)

At the moment it is not considered “broken”.

The search tables are the largest tables in our database. There are 87,676 words that are currently indexed, and 3,225,219 word - post combination records. Adding two or one letter words could increase that substantially.

The dots in 5.1.8 are considered punctuation and as such are not indexed. So the phrase 5.1.8 is considered to be 3 one letter “words” of 5, 1, and 8.

There is a plan in the words to add a new search option. Currently you can search for ANY or ALL words, you can also enter a specific query with AND or OR logic. You can search the body of the message, the title, or both. What is missing (and is in development) is the option to search for an exact phrase.

If you (or anyone else for that matter) is interested in submitting code changes to BOB, you should go to http://www.phpbb.com and download the current source code. Install it (we run on Linux, but you can install on Windows for development purposes) and see how it works.

Before you start writing up any code changes, please submit your plans to busobj@forumtopics.com to ensure that someone else isn’t already working on the same thing. Once you’ve done that, we’ll provide you with the current source code used on BOB for the pages you have identified as needing changes.

This is all very informal at the moment, as we currently only have one developer working on code changes. But if you have the time and the inclination to work on something, we can certainly consider it!

Bob (BOB member since 2002-06-06)

A possible alternative…

If you hop over to BOB’s Beta Site and scroll down to the bottom of the page, there’s an alternative that I’m experimenting with. It’s a call to google’s search algorithm.

If you search for 5.1.8 you will get a number of hits, including this topic. The advantage? You’re using Google’s search algorithm, not the one embedded in phpBB. The disadvantage? Google has not spidered (read) all of the topics for BOB, so you will not get to search every post.

Try it out, let me know what you think. Even though the footer modifications have been done on BOB’s Beta site, you will be searching the entire forumtopics.com domain. Which includes Production BOB.

Bob (BOB member since 2002-06-06)

Bob,

I like that Google search option. I really like that you included an option to search ForumTopics or all of the Web. I might suggest calling it BOB instead of ForumTopics, just to be clear. Other than that, it’s awesome.

MichaelWelter (BOB member since 2002-08-08)

But that’s not what it’s doing.

Google doesn’t allow you to specify a sub-directory, it’s only going to search the domain. So when you search with that option, you’re searching every page found (and indexed by the googlebot) under the forumtopics.com domain name.

Dave Rathbun (BOB member since 2002-06-06)

Yes, I realize that, but realistically speaking, and for all practical purposes, you are searching BOB, production and beta. But since there’s no content of substance on Beta Bob, the results should be pretty much limited to production Bob, right? Or could there be other Business Objects forums also using ForumTopics?

MichaelWelter (BOB member since 2002-08-08)

I love that Google search! It works great! Thanks for the workaround

cjweis (BOB member since 2003-10-02)

At the moment it is limited to Production BOB. We have a spider instruction file that tells google to ignore all other forums currently hosted on forumtopics.com. And yes, there are a few. In the future, however, we may ask google to spider more than one forum. There does not appear to be a way to ask google to search only specific paths within a domain.

Dave Rathbun (BOB member since 2002-06-06)

Cool, thanks again Dave

We spoke briefly at the BONYMAUG mtg last week - LDAP chat after the scalable architecture session. Great presentation on universe design!

Regards,
Chris

cjweis (BOB member since 2003-10-02)