RE: More on the avs search

["Zhou, Don" <dzhou@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi, David:

When I set this up, I set the adj.search to yes. Meaning if you want to
use the new functionality, the assumption is that you do not want the
system to automatically and things.  

To nest search terms, given this new functionality, you can use the near
and within in that one box to achieve the result of (x and y) or z,
except that the "and" is now near or within. 

I did not test it on nets 4. but glad that you found the bug.

Don Zhou
William Mitchell College of Law



-----Original Message-----
From: David Fuller [mailto:fullerd@xxxxxxxxxx] 
Sent: Friday, September 12, 2003 8:35 AM
To: innopac@xxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: More on the avs search

Don, et.al,

We've (Union College) also taken advantage of the new keyword search
form 
Innovative has
provided with release 3 but have noticed that it presents a few
problems.
http://libraryopac.union.edu/screens/srchhelp_X.html

One is that the functionality is provided via javascript and the coding 
isn't supported on all
browsers.  In particular IE on the Mac, and versions of Netscape 4.x
don't 
respond when
one clicks the Search button.  Of course no one *should* be using
Netscape 
4.x but that's beyond
our control.  I've traced this problem to a single javascript function 
"encodeURI".  If this line is
commented out the form will work...but buyer beware...I'm not entirely
sure 
what negative impact
this might have on your searching.

Perhaps a more serious problem is the way javascript encodes the user's 
search input.  It doesn't
seem to do nesting properly.  In particular using the Boolean "OR" the 
search syntax ends up like
this "search/X?(field)+or+(diamond)+and+(baseball)".   The Boolean AND 
takes precedence and
one ends up with search results that are probably different than what
was 
intended (assuming
the searcher understands Boolean logic).

We were delighted to see  that Innovative provided this kind of 
"seachbuilder" functionality and
at present plan to continue using it.  Our OPAC group needs to discuss
what 
to do, if anything,
about the nesting problem.

David Fuller
Systems Librarian
Union College
388-6621 (voice)
388-6641 (fax)

At 03:19 PM 9/10/2003 -0500, you wrote:
>There is quite a lot of discussions on AVS "and" and "or".  In the new
>release, you can actually make your superkeyword search page look like
>any other advance search page with the Boolean operators as one of the
>choices.  This design will likely make majority of the discussions
>non-issues. Take a look at our advanced search page:
>
>
>
>http://library.wmitchell.edu/search/X
>
>
>
>
>
>Don Zhou
>
>William Mitchell College of Law
>
>St. Paul, MN 55105
>
>
>
>
>
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