DonationCoder.com Software > N.A.N.Y. 2010

NANY 2010 Final Release: FarrWebMetaSearch

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phitsc:
I've uploaded a preliminary release for anyone interested to try out. The download link is in the first post. Just download and unzip into the FARR plugins directory, then restart FARR (or goreload). The alias is wms.

A few things to note:


* I've concentrated on the plugin functionality, so the searches themselves are not very sophisticated and numerous yet. For one thing, it would most certainly be possible to extract more relevant information. But more importantly, they probably won't give you the exact same results as the search on the actual web site would.
* Most search icons are from google image search, so I'm most certainly not allowed to distribute them with the plugin. Don't know what to do about these yet.
* There's no documentation about how to configure the searches yet. If you want to try configuring your own search (which I urge everyone to do :Thmbsup:), just check out the ones included. They are in the searches subdirectory.

* Each time you modify a search configuration file, you need to reload the plugin (goreload)
* There's no proper logging / debugging capability yet. If your search doesn't show after 'goreload', run DebugView while you're reloading the plugin. The regular expressions are checked for validity when the plugin is being loaded and invalid searches are (currently silently) discarded.
* I've found this site quite useful for coming up with regular expressions. If someone knows something better please let me know.
* The searches included are:

* Amazon US (this search shows how to configure search options)
* Amazon DE (because that's where I usually shop. Well, used to, before I bought a Kindle ;))
* CDDB
* C++ Reference
* IMDB (proofed difficult to split up using regular expressions)
* MSDN (which is why I actually wanted to code the plugin :))
* Tages Anzeiger Front Seite (which shows how use the plugin to show a news feed)

Perry Mowbray:
I've uploaded a preliminary release for anyone interested to try out.
-phitsc (December 29, 2009, 03:36 PM)
--- End quote ---

Cool  :-* But now I have to wait till I get home from work to play :mad:

Do you have a RedMine project for this so that people can upload new searches?  ;)

ewemoa:
I've given it a try -- looks pretty nice so far  :Thmbsup:

One thing that doesn't seem to work for me is getting the search to launch.  I have FARR customized so that there's a setting for "Overide Default Internet Browser with Custom Application" under "Program Options" -> "Settings" -> "External Tools" -> "Custom File and Browser Tools".

What happens after I press the Enter key is that I get a dialog box with:


* the title being a URL,
* a circular red icon with a white 'x',
* one line of text that appears to be the same URL as that in the title (e.g. for an Amazon search this might be a URL that takes me to a page for a book I presume), and
* a message that translates as something like "Application Not Found"
Looks something like the image of the dialog I see at:

http://www.winhelponline.com/blog/fix-for-application-not-found-error-when-opening-an-url/

Does this sort of set up work for anyone else?

Regarding regular expressions, I found this thread to be useful at various points.

BTW, have you considered using XPath expressions?

mouser:
working well.. very cool!

the msdn ones dont trigger a search for me.. i think you may have to add http:// to the urls.

amazon searches results seem a bit iffy.. here's my search for neural control, which should yield quite a few results:

phitsc:
working well.. very cool!

the msdn ones dont trigger a search for me.. i think you may have to add http:// to the urls.
-mouser (December 30, 2009, 07:11 AM)
--- End quote ---
I intentionally don't add the http:// to the urls (actually, I removed it :D), because otherwise FARR will not show the 'group' field (which I'm using to display additional information), but the url instead. Then, when an item is launched I add it again before launching. You're right though, MSDN doesn't work for me any more either. What I'll do now is change the launch code to use FARR's launch command instead of calling ShellExecuteEx myself. Will that use FARR's internal launch 'logic' (like external tools ewemoa is using) and the different launch methods FARR supports?

Thanks guys for checking it out!  :)

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